[2020] I knew Deathmatch XP was going to be painfully low... but really?

This is a bug. I just pushed a fix, the intended value is flat 500XP per match. We'll make sure the fix worked, then monitor and adjust as needed! Sorry about that.

edit: looks like the fix didn't go thru :( working on it

edit 2: should be actually fixed in NA now, granting 500XP per match. please DM me if you still see 100XP any time after this edit.

!pin

Our dev data shows that this mode takes ~half the time a spike rush match takes (combination of skipping agent select + shorter match time), so we're awarding half the XP. We will monitor prod data and adjust if we were off about this.

I'll talk to the team about this. I definitely see the value of getting more XP for matches where you're popping off, but I think this could cause some subtle gameplay behavior that we're trying to avoid. Our intent was for this to be a warmup/practice mode where players didn't need to worry about performance at all. The issue with awarding XP per kill is that it could incentivize people to heavily optimize towards min-maxing kills in the mode instead of using the mode for whatever practice they are currently looking for. Like, if a player wants to practice sheriff 1deags it'd suck if they felt like they were missing out on XP by doing so.

Mission progress is a tricky one. Basically if we allowed mission progress in DM, players would be able to complete any kill / damage related missions insanely quickly. We're already working hard to get daily / weekly mission tuning to a spot that makes battlepass progression feel fair. If we allowed mission progress in DM, we'd tune those kill/damage missions to require more kills/damage based on that, which would make deathmatch a must-play or else battlepass progression would feel much worse. We want to generally err towards the standard mode being the most efficient way to get XP in our game (aside: we're aware that the suicide spike rush behavior is a bit of an outlier - we don't think it's actually more efficient when you take into account time in menus + missed opportunities with missions - but we understand it's not a great experience for either side, so we're also talking thru mitigations to that), so we opted to just turn missions off in deathmatch.

The reason for the 30 kill limit is that we currently don't support joining in progress matches (this is something we want to do in the future - I'm actively investigating the work involved here, but it requires a large change to our platform). We also do currently allow leaving a deathmatch game to keep the time commitment low. If players can leave, but can't join, then the longer a match goes, the lower its player count goes since players will leave over time. We felt like 30 kills / 6 minutes was a good balance where players leaving wouldn't happen super often but when it does happen it won't make the match terrible for the players who stay.

Assuming we eventually support joining in progress, we'll re-assess supporting longer variants of deathmatch. In the state we're in now, we'll listen to feedback and consider tuning but will have to weigh the benefit of increasing cap / length against the disadvantage of matches trending towards fewer players connected at the end.

I was a redditor before I worked at riot. It's nice to finally have something relevant to bring to the conversations, I was a major lurker otherwise.

I think the value of being transparent and having conversations about this stuff with people far outweighs the cost.