Despite Valve warning them that matches will be “very rocky” to start, Deadlock players are struggling to adjust to the MOBA’s new ranked mode.
Late last week, Deadlock finally got a proper ranked mode, replacing the rudimentary version that existed for the last couple of years. Valve reworked the matchmaking system behind it, added a bunch of rules for how you climb the ranks, and created a new standard mode for casual play.
Valve warned players that “the next week or so” would be turbulent as everyone settles into their correct ranks, but it seems like people weren’t ready for how severe it would actually be. The Deadlock subreddit, as well as my YouTube feed, has been full of people discussing whether or not the new update was a miss.
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Some of the criticisms don’t surprise me: Players are discovering what it’s like to be forced to play a casual mode while they tally up enough wins to play ranked. Valve decided that you need 15 wins on a hero to play them in ranked, which is, by many accounts, a Sisyphean effort in the chaos of the standard mode. It’s even worse for all the people who spent their Deadlock careers maining a single hero and are only now trying to branch out.
Players cannot fathom why nobody is shotcalling over voice chat or playing like experts in a mode made to be a casual alternative to ranked. While my experiences in Overwatch make me sympathize with them a little, it also sounds like what you’d expect from playing an invite-only game that isn’t finished yet. Not everyone cares about optimizing their strategies like their life is on the line and the small pool of players means the match quality will waver more than it does in bigger games.
Maybe the requirement for ranked is too high, but you have to draw the line somewhere so it feels like a place for people who take the game somewhat seriously. It also doesn’t help that ranked players who were previously in the highest tier are finishing their placement matches three or four levels lower. This has made even ranked matches inconsistent, according to the people who have been in the mines for the last few days.
Like other games, Deadlock tracks your progress to the next rank through a points system and the numbers can fluctuate based on the skill level distribution of the players in a match. You can completely stomp a team and come out of it with almost no progress, for example. This has confused a lot of players as they struggle to reach the same rank they had before.
Given how much Valve has changed in the update, I suspect we might be seeing the result of a ranked system in the middle of recalibrating what each rank represents in the first place. It’s very possible that a high-ranked Eternus player who only played Mina before is now only an Oracle player when forced to flex to other heroes or when put on teams with a wider spread of skill levels (potentially due to the fractured player based across modes now).”People need to remove their expectations and just enjoy the game,” wrote one Reddit user. “If they can’t enjoy it because of their rank then that’s their problem not a problem with the game.”
All I know is that matchmaking systems are extremely complex and extremely delicate. Small changes can feel huge to certain sections of players. Deadlock is a game with a lot of barriers to entry that is probably exacerbating the frustrations that normally come with any kind of rank reset. So far, Valve hasn’t made any drastic changes, but I’ll be curious to see how things shake out in the next month or so.
