Long Deadlock queue times should now be a thing of the past. If you’ve been twiddling your thumbs for upwards of 20 minutes for games in Valve’s new MOBA, the team has now made some adjustments to bring wait times right down. A better “concentrated” set of playtime hours has been implemented, so even more players can attempt to match up at once. Deadlock is still raking in the player numbers, mind you, but now getting into matches will be even smoother than before.
Yes, there are a lot of people playing Deadlock. It’s not even fully out yet, and Valve’s MOBA is proving exceedingly popular. The game’s matchmaking schedule was a bit all over the place, though, so if you weren’t in the right place at the right time you could be stuck waiting. That’s all changed now, as according to Valve Deadlock’s matchmaking times have undergone a big overhaul. So long, queues.
“We have adjusted the matchmaking schedule to not be split across many different hours throughout the day, primarily to help address queue times,” Valve developer ‘Yoshi’ writes. “There will now be a wider continuous, but more concentrated, set of hours that it is enabled in. The schedule is now more simplified as well, as there is no more user selection component.”
Yoshi then followed this up a few hours later, explaining that Ranked now has weekend-specific hours. Some regions were also off by an hour or two, but that’s now been fixed so Ranked matches should happen at the same time everywhere. When asked about overly long queue times in the Deadlock Discord, Yoshi adds that Valve “spread out users too much in different times that it causes bad queue times/match quality.” So these Ranked matchmaking changes should improve wait times.
Deadlock’s uneven matchmaking has been a sore point since the MOBA went public, but that doesn’t mean Valve hasn’t been hard at work making adjustments. Many Deadlock MMR changes, which should stop players of uneven skill from facing off against each other, are on the way. That’s not all, as you can now give Valve your Deadlock matchmaking ID, so the team can evaluate what could’ve gone wrong with the system.
Keep in mind that Deadlock is still very much in active development, so matchmaking, MMR, and ranked changes will be ongoing. Valve did add the new Deadlock hero Mirage to the game recently, so I wouldn’t be surprised if more characters, maps, and mechanics make their way in soon.
With such a large roster in Valve’s newest MOBA, it can be difficult to know who to pick, so we’ve made a Deadlock characters breakdown. You can also make plenty of Deadlock crosshair choices, so make sure you have a HUD that best suits you.
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