Valve wants your help with Deadlock’s ongoing matchmaking woes. The invite-only MOBA is still in early development, so the Half-Life and Portal maker is asking you to provide details about sub-par matches for it to investigate. Since Deadlock’s existence went public the number of players has skyrocketed, so now Valve has a massive pool of data to pull from for its matchmaking rating (MMR) systems. Player feedback already indicates that there’s a lot of stomping going on across the board, so there’s a lot of balancing work still to be done.
The official Deadlock release date is a ways off yet, as Valve makes sweeping adjustments to its new MOBA. I’m not saying that to give the game’s poor matchmaking a pass, but rather to appropriately set your expectations. A lot more work needs to go into Deadlock, so while it is playable don’t assume it can be treated like a fully released game.
This is exactly why Valve wants your help. Deadlock’s matchmaking is anything but even right now, so a new post from developer ‘Yoshi’ is asking for your feedback. You just need to provide your match ID and a short description of what “you felt was a problem.” Matches in the 24 hours before the post was made (on Friday October 4) won’t be counted due to a bug that infested games, but anything before or after is fine to use as feedback.
The most common piece of criticism I’m seeing is that many matches are far too easy. It appears as though Deadlock’s MMR is often placing more experienced teams against new players, turning games into bloodbaths. “We took the tower in under three minutes in our lane and had multiple kills. We could clearly tell the players we were playing against were new,” ‘SamaMac’ writes. “40,000 soul difference in [a] 15-minute game and we had around six deaths and 50 kills.”
“We were totally crushed by a team that were mechanically better and just better all around and [they] tore us apart in 23 minutes,” ‘craigk277’ says, on the other end of the spectrum. “Had they not gone back twice and [decided] to spawn kill us they would have had a sub 20-minute game.”
Last month Valve promised it was fixing Deadlock’s broken MMR system, and this new method of player feedback is part of that undertaking. Yoshi already explained that Deadlock’s hero-based matchmaking “doesn’t work very well at the moment,” with a full rewrite of the system planned. Gathering match IDs and player descriptions of how it wasn’t working properly is a good first step, with more to come.
Remember that Deadlock isn’t an officially released game yet despite its popularity, with Valve using the high influx of players to get as much testing data as possible. There’s going to be MMR, map, and hero changes frequently going forward, so be sure to let the team know what isn’t working right. You can give Valve the feedback it wants right here.
If you’re feeling a little stuck in Valve’s new MOBA we’ve got your back, with the best Deadlock crosshair settings and a comprehensive Deadlock characters tier list. Combined, these will give you the edge you need in those long games of attrition.
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