Valorant players ask Riot to increase “painfully low” Deathmatch XP gain

Andrew Amos
Phoenix holding Frenzy in Valorant

Free-for-all Deathmatch is finally enabled in Valorant with plenty of players jumping in to flex their fragging muscles. However, the community has been in outrage over the “painfully low” experience gain, pleading with Riot to increase the drop rate.

FFA Deathmatch has arrived in Valorant. Players have six minutes to race to 30 kills in the new mode, with only one winner by the end of it all. It’s been a long-requested feature for warmups and practice, and now you can finally jump in and play.

While the new game mode isn’t as serious as booting up ranked, it’s still competitive. After all, there’s no fun in getting demolished. However, players have noticed there’s no incentive to get frags in Deathmatch ⁠if you’re grinding for XP.

Valorant deathmatch experienceValorant players initially received a pitiful 100 XP for finishing a DM game. Riot has patched that bug, but players still aren’t satisfied.

Initial player concerns were over getting a measly 100 XP per “round” in Deathmatch. With the game just being one long round, there was only ever one drop of experience available for queuing up. However, Riot clarified that this was a bug, and the intended value is 500 XP.

Some players still believe this is too little experience though. It’s a flat rate that doesn’t change based on how many kills you get, so you could get no kills and still get the same XP as the player who drops 30.

On top of that, Deathmatch games don’t count towards mission progress. If you thought you’d be able to farm headshots or player damage just by playing the new, fast-paced game mode, you’d be mistaken.

The developers have come out and defended their system for the time being though. Given Deathmatch is the shortest matchmade game out of the three current modes, they believe it should offer the least amount of XP.

“Our dev data shows that this mode takes [approximately] half the time a Spike Rush match takes (combination of skipping agent select and shorter match time), so we’re awarding half the XP,” software engineer ‘tehleach’ told players on Reddit.

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They also explained that if Deathmatch had mission progression enabled, players would be able to farm incredibly quickly. There would be practically no reason to play any other game mode if all you were interested in was blazing through your battle pass and Agent contracts.

“If we allowed mission progress in Deathmatch, players would be able to complete any kill or damage related missions insanely quickly,” said tehleach.

“We’d [have to] tune those kill/damage missions to require more kills/damage based on that, which would make Deathmatch a must-play or else battle pass progression would feel much worse.”

However, they are open to change. Based on the community feedback so far, Riot are looking into increasing the total XP by giving experience for kills, although they are still hesitant.

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“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 warm up mode where players didn’t need to worry about performance at all.”

Valorant FFA Deathmatch is now live in all regions.

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About The Author

Hailing from Perth, Andrew was formerly Dexerto's Australian Managing Editor. They love telling stories across all games and esports, but they have a soft spot for League of Legends and Rainbow Six. Oh, and they're also fascinated by the rise of VTubers.