The news came in a blog post wherein the Elodie team thanked its players for giving it a chance: "Your enthusiasm, feedback, and love for Seekers of Skyveil meant everything to us. We built this game for YOU, and we’re grateful you found us … This isn’t the outcome we hoped for, but it doesn’t take away from what we were able to accomplish together. Thank you for being a part of our adventure."

In the same post, the team reflects on the game’s struggle to find a sustainably large playerbase: "Without the necessary funding to continue development and marketing efforts, we have no choice but to bring this short journey to an end."

While Seekers of Skyveil was the first game Elodie released, it wasn’t the first the studio worked on. It had initially secured $32.5 million in investor funding to make a social co-op game, before what the studio calls a "major pivot" saw the project evolve into the game that eventually released.

Those who did give Seekers a shot in its first month will be refunded for any in-game currency or DLC purchases they made, and all server locations will be available for the next 10 days. Until the game shuts down, all heroes will be free to play, and players will get a boatload of in-game currency and the premium version of the battle pass. After the 31st, anyone who owns the game will be able to launch it, but all forms of matchmaking will be inaccessible and it will be unavailable to add to your Steam library.

It always gives me a heavy heart to see these games go, especially so quickly; being purely multiplayer experiences, any sort of long-term preservation is usually out of the question. Despite Seekers of Skyveil's novel spin on the MOBA formula, it entered a crowded space dominated by titans like League of Legends and Dota 2, and the recent launches of similar hero-based PvP games like Deadlock, Marvel Rivals, and Supervive only split up the pie further. Such rapid closures are upsettingly common these days, with the recent Star Wars: Hunters not even making it to its Steam launch.

If you’re keen to set a course for Skyveil one last time, the game is free to download on Steam.

Riot said in a January update that League's reward systems had "become needlessly complex, with an excessive number of currencies, unnecessary steps to craft and claim rewards, overlapping loot types," and other issues. To rectify that, the studio moved most of the game's rewards onto the battle pass, a move meant to streamline the process. But doing so left level-up rewards almost non-existent, making it more difficult for new players to unlock champions and skins.

The studio quickly acknowledged a problem with the underlying numbers and promised to "significantly increase" Blue Essence rewards, but some players continued to call for a return to the old system, or at the very least for the return of Hextech Chests, and now Riot has relented.

"It’s clear that for many of you, Hextech Chests weren’t just a way to get stuff, they were an important part of making your time in League feel rewarding," Riot wrote in a new developer update. "We didn’t fully grasp how much this mattered to you, and that led us to make changes that missed the mark."

So, with the release of the 25.05 patch next week, Hextech Chests are back: Players will be able to earn 10 chests and keys per act, eight on the free battle pass reward track and two more earnable through Honor. To make room for the addition of Hextech Chests, some battle pass rewards will be "consolidated," although Riot says it "won’t be changing the total amount of Blue Essence you earn per Pass, just moving it around a little." Riot also said the chests earned through the battle pass and Honor "will be the exact same Chests as the ones you got through Champ Mastery."

As for new champions, Riot said building out a roster is "a clear problem for new players," and in order to help ensure League remains "accessible," the 25.05 will also see the Blue Essence cost of all champions reduced by 50%. Changes are also coming to skins: The Exalted Mordekaiser skin is being delayed "to make sure it better delivers on its core fantasy," and more time will be dedicated to future Exalted skins, "so you likely won’t see one in every Act this year as originally planned." The overall number of Season skins is also going to be cut, so developers can spend more time on getting them right.

"Going forward, you can expect 3 thematic skins per pass, 2 normal skins and 1 Prestige," Riot wrote. "For Act 2, our plan is that the skins on the paid battle pass will be Prestige Darius, Sion, and Talon."

Some pretty big changes, then, and while not all players are entirely satisfied with the state of things, the general response to the re-addition of Hextech Chests and the reduced champion costs seems widely positive. And there's one more bit of good news: Head of studio Andrei "Meddler" van Roon said on Reddit that players who bought a champion in the 25.4 patch can contact player support to get half the Blue Essence cost back.

The League of Legends dev team said on X that it's working on rolling out the 25.05 patch to the public beta environment today, but warned that some aspects of it "don't reflect the changes we've outlined in this morning's Dev Update. We're working on those currently and it may take a little time to reflect in that build."

In a Steam post, Valve described these extensive layout changes in typically terse fashion. "The map has been redesigned around being 3 lanes rather than 4. This has a large number of accompanying map-wide changes regarding visuals, building layouts, pathways, neutral camps, air vents, breakables, powerup buffs, juke spots, mid boss, etc." To accompany these alterations, Valve has also added an 'Explore map' feature, where players can "run around an empty city to test movement and navigation."

Like I said, it's a substantial rework, but what do these changes mean? Well, it seems Valve didn't just reduce the number of lanes, but eliminated solo lanes from the map entirely, pushing players to work together in duos. Valve doesn't explain why it's done this, but it's possible the change is to ensure new players don't get bundled into a solo lane they're not equipped to handle. Valve recently tweaked matchmaking to make the game fairer on new players, so such an alteration would fall in line with that emphasis on designing a fun experience for everyone.

As Valve mentions, this is far from the only change made to the map. The update adds several skybridges that stretch between several of the map's tower blocks, with powerups emplaced on those bridges, a fairly obvious incentive for players to get vertical. It also relocates the midboss, adds new jungle camps, and gives the whole environment a big splash of colour.

Although the map is Valve's primary target here, the update also tweaks pretty much every area of the game. DLSS support has been added "as an FSR2 alternative for temporal anti aliasing and upscaling". Soul orbs have been reworked so that they now visibly fly toward players when collected, but also hang around for a shorter duration. Damage reporting had been made much more detailed, with the system visualising "the amount of damage reduced by resistances or shields" while also showing "the number of instances of damage done by each ability". I'm also weirdly fond of the simple declaration "ziplines are now curved". I don't know why this pleases me so much, but it does.

Meanwhile, pretty much every playable character has been modified, refined or improved, whether that's new animations for the likes of Abrams, Mirage, and Sinclair, voiceover remasters for Lady Geist, Dynamo, and Infernus, or adjustment to how abilities work (which most characters have received in some form or another). Sadly, Valve has yet to make the most sorely needed character change, refusing to revert Fathom's name to the far more enjoyable Slork (slork).

You can read the full changelog here. Valve's experiment of developing a game directly alongside the community seems to be progressing smoothly, though this is now somewhat contingent on how players react to these extensive map changes. If you've yet to try Deadlock yourself and fancy getting involved, you can find out details about that here, but the short version is, you need to be invited by someone who already has access.

They’re welcome changes! Dota is still Dota, though, which means that when it’s not making me feel triumphant, it’s often making me feel miserable.

I’m a lapsed player with 4,500 hours under my belt, and while my days of booting up Dota every night with the gang in tow now belong to a distant halcyon youth, I do pop back in for every big update. This is undoubtedly one of those, boasting a river that’s burst its banks and brought a bunch of evolving frogmen with it, introducing a sort of middleground camp between the weaklings in the regular jungle and the beefy ancients.

Middleground in terms of how tough they are to tackle, that is. In terms of actual ground most of them are tucked away at the very bottom and top of the map, which means I hardly ever go and visit them (and by visit I mean murder). At least the tadpoles they start as are cute.

The rivers are another neat idea I foresee being fiddled with, potentially speeding them up to be a bit more impactful. The central stream is unchanged, but you can now gain a speed boost by jogging down the new rapids that stretch across both jungles and alongside each safelane. Rapids might be an overstatement: the current currents improve your move speed by 100 or 150, depending on which stream you’re jogging through. Perhaps I haven’t yet learnt how to spot good opportunities to use them, but so far I haven’t had a game where they’ve made a noticeable difference to a gank or a getaway. At the moment they add a welcome splash of visual variety, but little more.

Those headline rivers may be a bit of a damp squib, but I’m pleased to see Roshan back where he belongs, near the centre of the map. I liked how 2023’s New Frontiers update gave him a commute, but didn’t like how far away he was from the action. This new iteration brings the best of both worlds, where you still get the dynamism of him moving about, but not on the fringes of the map where he’s less likely to be fought over. The best part is that when he moves house at the start of every day or night, he now comes stomping right down the central river, picking up and yeeting any hero he bumps into along the way. I’ve had a few giggles when he’s interrupted a brewing teamfight, and Reddit has many more. It’s a lovely injection of slapstick.

I’m also enamoured with one specific quality of life update: being able to swap over an item from your courier to your active slots without waiting for a brief cooldown. Having to prepare an empty slot was a boring and fiddly consideration that tripped me up more times than I care to admit — now, as Valve put it, a vital item delivered at the last second is more likely to turn a teamfight. It’s one of those tiny changes with an outsized impact on play.

The new way neutral items work is also much less of a faff, despite also being more complicated and interesting. They’re now crafted using a resource you get from clearing jungle camps, and they let you combine a familiar (or newly added) neutral item with a buff like improved attack range, spell damage, or just straight up health or mana. It’s a tasty pick and mix, giving you more flexibility to cover your hero’s weaknesses or embrace an advantage.

Highs and lows

That’s about it for the big changes, apart from tweaks to the Tormentors (only one now!) that I won’t go into, because my team has only been coordinated enough to take it down in a couple of my games so it’s largely been irrelevant. And there's the rub.

Dota’s a team game, but it’s luck of the draw whether the people you’re playing with will see it that way — and it’s a near certainty they’re going to be dicks. Toxicity isn’t a Dota-specific problem, but it’s exacerbated by long, often gruelling games where mistakes are very visible. The defending high ground advantage, combined with immunity glyphs, turn games into drawn out battles that make the siege of Ceuta look like a school child’s time out. They are exhausting.

Comebacks are vanishingly rare in that situation, albeit magical when they do happen, but the lows make me question whether they’re worth the tradeoff… and long for 顿别补诲濒辞肠办’蝉 relatively breezy matches. No game can match the high of a glorious Dota 2 comeback, but nor has any game ever felt as grim as a drawn out loss alongside four teammates who are somehow even more toxic than the arseholes from the last round. It doesn’t help that the meta, at my level at least, seems stuck in the same place it was years ago, i.e dominated by fat Phantom Assasins. I’ve had precisely one game where anyone has picked either of the new heroes added since I last played.

Nevertheless, those highs are Everest high, especially when you feel you were the lynchpin to success. I’d forgotten about the background thrum of satisfying sound design, too, every plink of gold adding oomph to a last hit. Most importantly, there’s that constant churn of considerations, busying your mind with attempts to gain a strategic overview or execute a tricksy play.

I think I’m also seeing some benefit from the 500 something hours of Deadlock I’ve played since my last Dota stint. The cut and thrust feels sharper in my mind: the importance of a split push, of dancing around a teamfight and only committing when a vital spell is off cooldown, or else the importance of just scarpering. There’s something about seeing a similar struggle play out in three dimensions that clarifies the concepts, perhaps.

Still. The misery of solo queuing puts me off playing more, with an overwhelming lack of teamwork combined with constant dickwaddery. Dota is still Dota — but of course, all of that doesn’t apply if you’ve got some pals to play with. The map changes might not be as big of a shake up as they first seem, but if the gang got back together, I’d happily join them for many more evenings of mildly-faster river running fun. Maybe it’s time to round up yours.

League of Legends developer Riot Games recently announced that a hotly coveted character skin is coming to the MOBA. Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser will convert the game's necromantic top-laner from his default lich appearance back to his human form. It's a cosmetic with a lot of significance to League's canonical story, and Riot clearly knows it, putting together a dramatic trailer to accompany the announcement, viewable above.

In short, it's a big moment for the League of Legends community. But any player wanting to play as human Mordekaiser will likely have to pay through the nose to do so. That's because Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser will be added to League's recently created 'Exalted' tier of skins, and these can only be acquired by engaging with League's gacha-style Sanctum. Nabbing an Exalted skin from the Sanctum can be eye-wateringly costly, with League fans recently calculating that two-thirds of players won't receive an exalted skin before spending 32000RP, which converts to $246.15. Or as I like to think of it, four Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2s.

Naturally, the community feels pretty sour about the whole thing. " One of my all time most wanted skins ever was Sahn-Uzal/pre-resurrection Mordekaiser" wrote YouTuber NickyBoi on X, "but all that hype is obliterated knowing it's stuck in a $200 fomo gacha store". The responses to League's official reveal of the skin on X are similarly unimpressed, with many replies claiming that the skin looks cheap, as well as being expensive to acquire. Meanwhile, the r/MordekaiserMains channel is in complete meltdown, currently an endless scroll of posts with titles like "LMFAO @ Sahn Uzal 250$ skin" and "Can we all agree and come together to not spend a single cent on this scam skin?"

This isn't the first time Riot has landed in hot water with its community over perceived skin scalping since the launch of the Exalted tier. In June last year, fans pushed back against the introduction of a skin for vulpine mage Ahri that could cost up to $500. In response, game director Pu Liu said the pricing was "justified" because "the vast majority of players spend $0 on a free play game. As a consequence of that, the majority of our revenue comes from a small, single-digit percentage of players."

These players are commonly referred to in the industry as "Whales", and whale chasing is an established, if controversial, industry practice, especially when combined with the gambling element of gacha mechanics. The Sahn-Uzal skin is a good example of why. Whereas the Ahri skin was designed to celebrate renowned League player Faker, this one, as already mentioned, is quite closely tied to League lore, and therefore subtly pushes on a larger number of buttons that might tempt players into rolling the dice. On the face of it, everything here is optional and it's up to players whether they engage, but beneath this is a whole element of psychological manipulation, tempting players both to engage with the gacha mechanics in the first place, and then keep rolling until they get a reward in classic sunk-cost fallacy fashion.

The Sahn-Uzal Mordekaiser skin arrives into League on March 5. Riot has made a run of questionable decisions lately, and not just regarding its business practices. In January, League received an update designed to get rid of "unnecessary complexity", which ended up making it next to impossible for new players to earn anything outside of the battle pass. After investigating, Riot admitted it had "screwed up" the calculations for the new reward system, stating that "the numbers we shipped were pretty far off from what they should be for many of you."

That's as per both a message posted to Hi-Rez's eSports Discord, shared here by Smite pro Hayzer, and comments provided to Kotaku from the studio's president Stewart Chisam. The message, from an admin named Hinduman, reads: "Smite 1, Paladins and Rogue Company servers will remain available for the foreseeable future, but no further major updates are currently planned for these games.

"We understand this may come as a disappointment to many of you, but know that Paladins has an incredibly special place in our hearts. We plan to keep the servers and currently available content running as long as possible to allow you to continue to enjoy the game."

Just for the sake of confirmation, I checked the official Paladins Discord server, too. Moderator PWNDotcom writes: "Active development of Paladins is being halted. No more major updates are expected, however the servers will remain online."

Chisam would later confirm to Kotaku that around 70 people are being laid off. Over on the r/Smite subreddit, a list of impacted staff is being collected. This includes balance designers like Lexie "LermyWermy" Lerman, as well as eSports staff such as broadcast producer Billy Basikally. This isn't exactly the first time of trouble at Hi Rez, which appears to be shuffling all of its eggs into one basket.

In October last year, the studio laid off employees to ensure "long term success", while also announcing the closure of two games. Paladins, in particular, wasn't seeing many major updates, with the most recent champion, Omen, releasing in 2023. That's not to say there haven't been patches, mind—from what I can tell, the game's devs have mostly been focused on bug fixes and quality of life improvements. Which is a little sad in the rear view, improving a game for a future it won't really see.

Chisam continues to write: "We know this is an exceptionally difficult time to find work in the industry, which makes it even more devastating to have let go of so many loyal and talented developers. We pursued every angle available to us to avoid these cuts, but it was necessary to ensure that we survive in this tumultuous environment."

Instead, Smite 2 is going to be the "primary focus of the newly streamlined operations" and—man, there's that word again, 'streamlined'. I don't want to come across as a cynic, but I'm starting to develop an inverse pavlovian response to the words streamlined, lean, and agile as a result—it especially rings a bit hollow considering Chisam's statements last year, where he stated that the layoffs then "reflects a failure in my leadership, and one for which I take personal accountability." In this case accountability apparently means, uh, doing the same thing a few months later.

It just appears to be a bad habit of the games industry. It's one thing for Hi-Rez to slow down support on older games—as much fun as Paladins was, it is coming up on its 10th year—it's another to, as Michael Douse put it last week while firing shots at EA, fail to retain "institutional knowledge". I'm not privy to Hi-Rez's financials, but it really does all seem backwards. We're in a cursed time loop where devs are rewarded for their hard work on one project by being shown the door because the next can't support them.

That Riot Games has steered clear from adding fully fledged voice chat to League might not be too surprising when you consider the reputation its community has earned. In 2023, Riot developer Joe White noted that its introduction could create new problems, "especially for women and POC who get unfairly targeted by simply participating in voice comms".

However, voice chat has actually never been properly tested in League—at least not outside of esports and parties. On top of that, all the other major competitive online games, like Valorant, Apex Legends, Counter-Strike 2, and Call of Duty have voice chat. Although the League community is notoriously toxic, it's hard to find reasons why Riot hasn't even trialled the feature, giving the players at least the benefit of the doubt.

While not all players agree voice chat would be a great addition to the game, the League community has been asking for it for years now. Not only would it help players communicate vital pieces of information and reduce the number of unnecessary throws, but it would also help to bring League up to the modern gaming standards of highly competitive games.

Play to win

No matter if you're a regular ARAM enjoyer or a hardcore Solo Queue grinder, we all want to win in League. To do this, you need to keep track of your enemies on the minimap, along with their cooldowns and items; the spawn times of objectives; your positioning, tempo, and farming; and whatever potential crises your teammates might be dealing with. But it's considerably easier to play the game when that burden is shared among all five players and you can always ask in voice chat, "Where's the enemy jungler?"

Having all players in voice chat also adds an additional level of competition—with both teams on an even playing field, at least in terms of communication. This can best be felt during Clash tournaments, as most teams use Discord to increase their odds of winning and coordinate at a higher level. A lot of Clash matches are filled with nailbiting and adrenaline-fueled moments which likely never would have happened without voice chat.

The alternative, namely using pings, just doesn't cut it. We've all been there—spamming pings to our teammates so they don't go into the jungle, and they do it anyway, giving away a huge bounty and an objective. This might happen because they have pings turned off, you're on mute, or they are tunnel-visioning on the amazing play they have in mind. This entire situation, however, could be easily avoided with voice comms.

In some instances, you might not understand what the player is trying to tell you with their pings, especially when you're in the middle of a teamfight or skirmish. For example, a player might use the "On my way" ping during a skirmish, but you might not know if they are about to join the fight or if they plan on jumping at a nearby enemy. Pings would remain quite useful even with voice comms for fast communication without players trying to speak over one another, but they aren't as effective as the primary method.

War council

Two of the main concepts in League are micro and macro. While micro refers to your mechanical skills such as positioning and using cooldowns timely, macro involves aspects of the game such as objective control, roaming, rotations, and overall strategization. Although League is packed with action and many players rely on their micro to climb, macro is equally important, if not more so, mainly because no amount of mechanical prowess can help you if you don't know how to get the most out of a Baron buff.

But the macro side of things suffers without clear communication. Absent voice comms, you don't really have much time to plan out a strategy that would work for your team composition. Of course, you can use text chat, but realistically speaking, you don't have enough time to type out a full-blown strategy, let alone discuss it with teammates. Voice chat would allow you to DPS Baron Nashor and devise your next steps while you're doing that.

And when you're strategizing like this, or saving a teammate's bacon by warning them of trouble ahead, or coming to their aid when called, you're being humanized and generating camaraderie. League's reputation for toxic players is a bit of a generalization, but restrictions like this arguably make that rep harder to shake by not allowing players to show that they won't sink into the worst kinds of behaviors the moment their voice can be heard.

I am by no means saying everyone would suddenly become model players, transforming League into a utopia, but players would be incentivized to collaborate even more. If the situation gets out of control, there are options to mute the toxic individuals and report them through in-game tools. Riot has been stricter and stricter over the past couple of years with troublemakers, and has developed more systems to handle toxicity.

The most common way of monitoring voice chat is usually by recording and then reviewing it. Activision uses AI to review recordings in Call of Duty, for instance, and in Valorant Riot started rolling out the beta of its AI voice evaluation system all the way back in 2022. As per its audio file and transcript retention policies, it generates audio files and transcripts when a report is made or a violation is detected, and if there's a breach of the community code this can result in a comms restriction, a teamplay restriction, or an outright ban, from one day to permanent.

While AI allows support teams to quickly review a number of recordings, you can argue that it's missing that human touch and the ability to properly determine whether the behavior in question is worthy of a restriction or a ban. The best approach to punishing toxic players would be by combining both the support team and AI, but there's no perfect approach to creating a toxicity-free environment in competitive gaming. Riot clearly sees the value in trying to foster a less abusive community in Valorant, though, going so far as to invest in new tech, and it seems wasteful to not apply this to League as well.

The season of chat

Adding voice chat wouldn't miraculously solve League's toxicity problem, and there would still be players who would avoid it. However, that could put them at a heavy disadvantage and they'd have to work with the information forwarded to them via pings and text chat. However, adding the option to simply listen in on comms would easily solve that. Unfortunately, the sentiment of not being able to join due to the risk of abuse would remain. But issues like this won't be resolved if a full voice chat feature isn't at least tested—it simply hides the problems rather than confronting them.

It's time to at least try it and give players an opportunity to prove to Riot they can work together. An interesting, yet safe way to do that would be to implement a seasonal voice chat that would work only in Solo Queue. That way, Riot could test out the impact of voice chat on the quality of games and the levels of toxicity. On top of this, Riot could use the gathered data as a foundation to further reduce toxicity and improve the future iterations of voice chat.

It's hard to say if Riot will ever be able to spruce up the community to such an extent that voice chat would be added, but given that League is a highly competitive game where you depend on team communication, there are so many reasons why it should exist. League is an entirely different game when players collaborate towards the same goal—destroying the enemy Nexus.

But it's not just the newer heroes that are getting tweaked. Haze got a couple of buffs to Bullet Dance, Grey Talon's Spirit Snare got buffed, Kelvin's Arctic Beam now also slows roll distance by 20%, and Shiv's Serrated Knives now pass through Soul Orbs to hit one more target.

That last change was especially notable for one player. Some updates are easier to predict than others, especially when it comes to heroes with overpowered or seriously weak abilities. But someone managed to predict Shiv's new knives a couple of days before the change was announced.

"So three days ago, I made this suggestion post, and everybody here hated it," says redditor KarlKaiser47. "Now it's in the game!" The original post saw the player suggest that it could be neat if the devs could make abilities like Shiv or Geist's knives still secure souls but then also travel through them so they can hit one more target.

"Find it annoying when you kill a creep or your laning partner kills it, and then you try to throw a knife at the enemy, but it gets absorbed by the soul. It could also make for some cool trick shots where you secure the soul and hit someone at the same time."

While this didn't get a whole lot of traction, the other players who commented on the idea clearly weren't too fond of it. Someone else jokes that if the devs implement this, then they may as well "make it go through the wall, too," or "add an automatic aimbot so you can never miss." While others just said that this change would be the same as bullets passing through enemies.

Well: We're going to find out! And making slightly wacky changes like this is one of the benefits of still being in a playtest: Nothing's set in stone yet, and it's better that the developers experiment with ideas and heroes now while it's still in production.

"In case anyone is still on the fence, this is the time for them to add quirky, fun shit because it sounds fun; nothing matters right now," another player says. "It might have consequences, it might not, but they can make sweeping changes without having any degree of hesitation on how it impacts a single thing. They're free to do fun shit."

I'm not entirely sure we can attribute this new Shiv change to this one comment alone, but the timing of everything is certainly amusing. And who knows, maybe the developers like to troll for zany ideas bouncing around in Reddit or Discord, and there's no shortage of recommendations to test out.

If you look on TrackLock, there's now a more distinct bell curve that follows the more usual distribution of skill levels seen in competitive games. Although instead of being kind of bottom-heavy, with the majority of players slotted into the lower ranks and then tapering off into the higher-skill tiers, Deadlock seems to be middle-heavy.

This could be because the players who spend the time to establish their rank in Deadlock are more dedicated to it than players of other games or that Deadlock doesn't have the same kind of rank deterioration that older competitive games exhibit. Whatever the case is, this distribution means that there's a tiny percentage of players left at the very bottom rank.

Out of the 70,000 competitive Deadlock players there's just 75, or 0.1%, in Initiate, the bottom rank. And within the six subranks, there are just seven at the very lowest, Initiate I. There's nothing wrong with being at the bottom. To be honest, if I decided to give ranked play a go again, then the number of Initiates would probably go up to 76, but even so, other Deadlock players are wondering why there's so few of them.

"Okay but only 75 players?! They should have some company down there," one player says. Someone else suggests that instead of just having a watch live tab for Eternus players (the top rank), there should also be an option to sit in and watch Initiate games.

It's a little odd, but having such few numbers at the bottom isn't a massive issue. Yes, Initiate players will largely play among themselves, but they'll also go up against Seeker players when they're vying to rank up. There'll also likely be more players joining the lower ranks when Deadlock officially releases, and a swell of newbies join the game.

Deadlock and its ranked mode have improved incredibly quickly since its launch, thanks to the constant updates the devs have been putting out. There's been changes to account for players strengths and weaknesses with specific heroes and even an extra competitive option for those who want to take ranked matches really seriously. And even though these new features may not be coming as quickly in the future as Valve has decided to slow down updates and take a more methodical approach to changes, I can only see Deadlock's ranked play going from strength to strength.

The changes, announced in November 2024, were intended to reduce the "unnecessary complexity" of League's reward system by moving most of it to the free track of the game's battle passes. "Most rewards will now be in one place, with systems like Honor and Champion Mastery feeding into the pass," van Roon explained in a dev update. "For example, having a higher Honor level will give a bonus to past experience earned.

"There will always be a battle pass active with both a free and a paid track, with the price the same as an Event Pass today. You'll get Pass rewards through the tracks, meaning we're removing the Event Tokens and Shop."

But the elimination of the previously-existing level-up rewards had the knock-on effect of making it much harder to unlock new champions and skins, particularly for new players: One redditor estimated it would likely take more than a year for a new League of Legends player to be able to play ranked matches, because players need to be level 30 and own at least 20 champions to be eligible, and it would take that long to achieve those requirements. "This really feels like a bug to me [rather] than being intentional," they wrote.

As it turns out, they were correct. Van Roon said in today's update that Riot intended to ensure the earn rates for Blue Essence—an in-game currency used to unlock new content—were the same or slightly better for all players under the new system. It also didn't mean to slow the speed of leveling or increase the number of games required to access ranked play.

But an analysis of player behaviour reveals that this is exactly what happened for the majority of the League of Legends player base. The changes worked out as intended for "low engaging players," but the higher up you go in terms of hours played, the worse it gets: "Super high" engagement players have seen their Blue Essence earn rate cut by more than 71% under the new system.

All of this happened, van Roon explained, because Riot biffed the numbers. "We realized that we didn't factor in the First Win of the Day experience into our calculations for BE income—both directly from that XP boost and the indirect faster access to Champion Capsules from account leveling," he wrote. "As for account XP, the problem is very similar—we hadn't accounted for the loss of FWotD, which meant drastically slowing the progression of accounts and therefore access to Ranked."

To address the issue, Riot says it will "significantly increase" the Blue Essence earn rates on the free battle pass track in changes expected to go live in patch 25.S1.2, as seen in the chart below:

Because the Act 1 season pass is live and some players have already passed the Blue Essence milestones, Riot will also roll out a "one-time easily completable mission" that will grant players 4,250 Blue Essence, to make up for what should have been granted through the battle pass. Account XP earn rates will also be increased by 40% to ensure the number of games required to reach level 30, and thus ranked access, will be roughly where it was before the changes were made.

The reaction to the admission and incoming fixes seems generally positive, although quite a few players on X and the League of Legends subreddit are calling for a reversion to the old rewards system, or at the very least the return of Hextech Chests. But there's still pretty widespread discontent to be seen, and that likely won't change until the fixes are fully rolled out and Riot demonstrates that player rewards are effectively the same as they were under the previous system.

Beyond the fixes, van Roon said Riot will "be digging more into exactly why this slipped through to begin with, and how we can prevent similar issues from arising in the future. We'll keep you updated as we continue to look into these systems on any potential adjustments, and we apologize for our misses here on both the numbers tuning and comms around what was/wasn't changing."

League of Legends season 1 saw a bunch of new features and changes made, including a new thematic that revolves around Noxus, a change to ranked resets, and a more streamlined reward system. While the last change may seem like a smart idea, it's wound up causing more harm than good for some players.

"Over the years these systems have become needlessly complex, with an excessive number of currencies, unnecessary steps to craft and claim rewards, overlapping loot types, we could go on," developer Andrei Van Roon says in a dev update. "You've been given some key fragments that you then have to craft into a key that you pair with a chest, that you open up to get another key and a chest and some essence that you open up to get a skin shard then you pay for some orange essence or reroll to eventually get a random skin. That's sort of a level of unnecessary complexity going on."

Another problem with rewards in League of Legends was that everything was scattered throughout the client. It was needlessly hard to keep track of how to get rewards and where they ended up. So, to solve the issue of unorganised rewards, the developers decided to just put it all in one place: the battle pass.

"We're moving most of our scattered reward systems to the free track of those battle passes," Roon says. "So most rewards will now be in one place, with systems like Honor and Champion Mastery feeding into the pass. For example, having a higher Honor level will give a bonus to past experience earned.

"There will always be a battle pass active with both a free and a paid track, with the price the same as an Event Pass today. You'll get Pass rewards through the tracks, meaning we're removing the Event Tokens and Shop."

It seems that after this patch, it will take 882 hours to get a new hero for free。 from r/leagueoflegends

Unfortunately, streamlining rewards isn't the only consequence of these changes. Some players realised that this reliance on the battle pass now means level-up rewards are non-existent, making it harder for new players to unlock champions and skins.

"It seems that after this patch, it will take 882 hours to get a new hero for free," cpztpkqc says. "Right now, you can only get Blue Essence from the Battle Pass. After you grind through the first 50 levels, you need to play for 882 hours to unlock a single extra champion! Is League of Legends deliberately trying to shut out all newcomers?"

It used to be that players could get champion capsules after reaching a new level. Those provide champion shards and/or Blue Essence, which you could then use to unlock new champions. But you now have to get these entirely from the battle pass.

However, the battle pass will still provide some good incentives via free rewards for players to earn. "You can earn 12 skins per year with the free pass. Half of these skins will be themed to the season you unlock them in," Roon says. "We'll also be simplifying the loot and crafting system... Overall, we want the pass to be the core vessel for how you track and earn rewards. If you choose to buy the paid version, we also want it to be very clear what you're getting and how to make the most of it."

For the most part, players are angry on behalf of newcomers who won't have access to the 169 champions, and will now have to work even harder to unlock the roster. Or for casual players who don't want to invest a ton of time and money into League of Legends but still want to be rewarded for the effort they do put in.

"So, they have not only removed the weekly chests that kept the casual players that play very seldom in the game, [but also got] rid of the champion capsules once you level up, nerfing the pass and releasing deteriorated [skins] in terms of quality," one player says. "They really want to kill their own game by being anti-f2p."

League of Legends is 16 years old now, and has had a famously hard time when it comes to fostering new players. Last year, a senior Riot developer reported that the League of Legends playerbase is getting older: "Candidly, it's not the same situation it was 10 years ago."

Even after the success of Arcane, a report from Bloomberg suggested that Riot still couldn't retain the new players that it caught through the animated series. So making progression less rewarding may not be a step in the right direction for League of Legends, not if they want to encourage new players to withstand the onslaught of flaming from their angry teammates who, in my experience, zero in on newbs from miles away.

"As we start 2025, we are going to be adjusting our update schedule to help improve our development process," one Valve dev who goes by Yoshi says in the game's official Discord. "While it was very helpful for us in the beginning, we've found that our fixed two-week cycle has made it more difficult for us to iterate on certain types of changes internally, as well as sometimes not giving enough time for the changes themselves to settle externally before the next update came around.

"Going forward, major patches will no longer be on a fixed schedule," Yoshi adds. "These patches will be larger than before, albeit a little bit more spaced out, and hotfixes will continue to be released as needed. We look forward to fleshing out the game in the new year."

Deadlock often saw heroes buffed and nerfed in record time. This has its benefits, as it meant that no one hero stayed too overpowered for very long, but it was also quite a lot for players to keep up with. I stopped playing Deadlock for a few weeks, and on my return, I found that the hero I'd played for the better part of a month—learning strats, builds, and matchups—had been nerfed into the floor.

Although it seems counterintuitive, longer wait times for updates will mean that the changes made to Deadlock stick around for longer, giving the devs more time to polish them. Most players also seem to understand this, and support the developers and their decision to slow their roll.

"Seeing how early the game is, I think this is a great change. Less pressure, more time for them to make the changes they want to make," one player says. "Also means a less sporadic meta, which might be nice. Though the chaos of the first few months has been fun, all my friends who did play are gone because of it."

Deadlock is still only in its infancy, so it makes sense that updates have been so frequent and frenetic until now. Despite being in beta, I've had a ton of fun with Deadlock so far, and I'm really excited about what big changes the developers will bring to the table next.

The venture's been so successful, in fact, that Riot's promised new shows featuring Demacia, Noxus, and Ionia. We know that Fortiche is involved, making this season's Noxus-themed trailer very interesting because, well, just look at the thing.

It's all looking too fleshed out to be a throwaway. New designs take a while to formulate—meaning smaller-scale animation projects like trailers and the like will try to keep the scope of what they actually show relatively limited. Unless Fortiche is incapable of keeping its cool (which is very possible) the sheer budget poured into this trailer's multiple locations has me suspicious we basically just got a trailer for a new show disguised as a game advertisement.

There's also the fact that there are several new redesigns for League of Legends champions, here. The two most obvious are Darius and Trundle, who we can see duking it out to a captive audience in the Freljord, but I'm pretty much certain that the woman we see fighting with twin blades is Katarina, a Noxian assassin, pitched against creepy spider-woman Elise. The golden-collared mage at the end is likely LeBlanc, too, accompanied by Vladimir. All of this to say, you don't just redesign six iconic champions if you aren't planning on doing anything with 'em.

The timeline makes sense, too. Arcane showrunner Christian Linke also stated back in November 2024 that the next show's been in development for about a year, which is ample time to have a set of character designs and sets finalised for a trailer. I'd be shocked if the designs we're seeing here are going to change much, going forward.

Besides, not only is Mel just there, showing us her character's trajectory after the events of Arcane Season 2, LeBlanc outright states that "Piltover was a lesson" before hinting at some Black Rose cabal mischief. Folks, if I'm not looking at a teaser for Fortiche's next League spinoff, then I'm not sure what I'm looking at, at all.

Update: Riot has clarified that the new looks for Elise and Katarina in this cinematic are the Masque of the Black Rose Elise and Prestige Masque of the Black Rose Katarina skins. Riot also announced in today's dev update that LeBlanc is getting a visual update, which would explain the new look. So, impressive trailer, absolutely, but a preview of the upcoming Noxus show? It looks like it might be hat-eatin' time.

Seekers of Skyveil, the game that mashes up MOBA-style gameplay with extraction shooter mechanics—and seems to be doing a very good job of it—announced today that it's set to launch into early access in March. But first, another round of playtesting is set to kick off on January 10 on Steam.

Seekers of Skyveil looks like a MOBA, but what lies underneath is really quite different. PC Gamer's Tyler Colp took an early version of the game for a spin in May 2024 and was well impressed with it, describing its unusual genre structure as "elastic in a way that the typical MOBA structure doesn't allow, which gives it a strong chance at bringing in people who aren't interested in a game that mostly hinges on your performance in its final moments"—which is to say, people who aren't generally into MOBAs. Of course, people who do like MOBAs will probably dig it too, and if you're unsure on that front, this is a great opportunity to find out.

This round of playtesting, open to players in North America, will be the largest yet, running for 10 days from 4 pm to 10 pm PT each day and open to all who apply to get in on Steam. Everyone who plays during this playtest will be given an exclusive emote for playing at least one day and a new crown cosmetic for doing at least five days. Twitch Drops rewards will also be offered over the course of the test. To get into the playtest, just swing by the Steam page and click the "request access" button—you should be able to download the client and get in right away.

More testing will follow in February, including a week-long stress test during Steam Next Fest between February 24 and March 3, which will see the servers running 24 hours a day. Assuming nothing goes catastrophically wrong, the end of the stress test on March 3 will signal the beginning of full-scale early access.

For context, the actors union has been taking action over a lack of AI protections for voice actors since July. In September, this strike extended to League of Legends, though Riot maintained its (relative) innocence.

See, Riot Games uses Formosa Interactive for its US voiceover work. Formosa is the named company that SAG-AFTRA was targeting by selecting League of Legends for strike action, rather than any named transgressions from Riot itself. That's not to sanitise Riot, mind—it has still chosen to continue its working relationship with Formosa, despite claims it "asked Formosa to engage with Union performers in the US". Still, Formosa seems primarily at fault for dragging its feet regarding AI protections.

An announcement on Riot's website goes into further detail: "During the strike, we’ll have to adjust how we handle English-language VO for certain skins to ensure we can still deliver new content. For League PC skins for champions with U.S.-based voice actors, we’ll temporarily use existing voiceovers (base VO) instead of recording new lines with different actors. While Wild Rift is not a struck video game, if actors decline projects with us because they are standing in solidarity during the labor strike, we will ship with base VO.

"Once the strike ends, we’ll update skins released with English base VO to include new lines recorded by the original actors, as soon as scheduling and studio availability allow. We know this isn’t ideal, and we understand it’s frustrating to have to wait for custom VO, but this approach lets us respect the ongoing strike while continuing to deliver new content. We’re committed to bringing you updated VO with the quality you expect as soon as we can."

This tactic has drawn ire from some voice actors already—see, SAG-AFTRA has interim agreements that companies can sign, allowing performers to "render services on that specific production without being in violation of the strike order." Some believe the move as Riot weaseling its way out of that potential solution.

Anairis Quinones, who voices characters in Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, as well as Kimberly in Street Fighter 6, writes: "Let’s translate the marketing shall we? They don’t want to sign the contract that would protect and promise their VAs won’t be used for AI, and would rather starve them thru the holidays and wait for them to stop striking." She's certainly not alone, and the quote posts are a minefield of voice actors and their supporters calling for Riot to sign on the dotted line.

Now, you could make the argument that Formosa Interactive is once more at fault, here, and that Riot is simply doing the best it can—but while I've reached out to Riot Games to hear its exact reasoning from the tap, Quinones also answers this directly in a separate thread:

"The recording studios they work with are at the behest of their client; if Riot wants to sign the interim contract that protects VAs, the studio will make it happen. If they don’t, the studios won’t. And if it’s the studio that’s going against the company’s wishes, then they would just go to another studio—and no studio wants to lose a major client like Riot."

Essentially, the counter-argument—not unfairly so—states that Riot does have a heck of a lot of pull here, and it's strange it's not leveraging it on behalf of its voice talent. Even in a best-case scenario, this is a half-measure. It's a little better than Call of Duty just quietly recasting actors (and potentially using AI), but still, nobody gives out 'not as much of an asshole as you could have been' awards. I'll update this article if I get a response from the studio itself—until then, the original voice work shall persist until the skins improve.

As the December 6 patch notes reveal, Valve has introduced an "extra competitive option" for players to venture into: "If you prefer to play with higher levels of coordination, communication, and competitiveness, then you can use this option to tell the matchmaker to build your team with like-minded allies. This option will sometimes be inactive in scenarios where the pool is very shallow (large portions of Eternus, off-peak hours like 5 am, extremely long queue, etc.), but otherwise, in most normal scenarios, the matchmaker will attempt to find you similar players."

You can turn up the competitiveness in your Deadlock games by simply clicking a box that appears after opening Queue Options, which you can find on the dashboard under your profile. Alongside this are also options for tweaking lane preference and incoming chat.

Before anyone decides to throw caution to the wind and give extra competitive a go, I do need to warn you that it isn't for the faint of heart. This mode should really only be restricted to high-level Moba players who are willing to go the extra mile within games. You need to be on top of calls, terms, and tactics—it's not just good enough to be half-decent at aiming and know when to farm creeps. At least, in theory. In practice, it seems to be going about as well as you'd expect.

"[I] tried 'extra competitive' mode and had one leaver and one person using the mic, lol," one player says. Turns out, asking people to check a box that says 'I'll be communicative and tryhard' isn't actually a guarantee that they'll do either of those things. Well, my team was pretty chatty in the match that I joined. But they had a lot to 'talk' about when it came to my incompetence, so that may have been the driving force.

Some players are so frustrated with poor teammates in this mode, they think Valve should introduce harsher penalties. "If you want to leave an extra competitive game for any reason, you should be banned from re-queuing the mode for 24+ hours," SilverFan3702 says. "You want to play in higher-standard games? You can, at the very least, ensure that you can sit at your computer for 45 minutes before hitting the queue button."

The comms in Deadlock have gotten exceedingly worse as time has gone on. When I first started playing the closed beta, almost everyone was in team chat and was pretty responsive to calls. But now, most matches I enter have hardly anyone speaking up, and the people who are in are usually just using their airtime to flame other players—it's not a very productive environment. It also used to be the case that if you had any communication bans, you'd be blocked from playing any competitive mode, which helped keep everyone talking.

So when it comes to the extra competitive mode, it's probably best to just stay with your usual matchmaking settings—it's likely they'll be easier to deal with and probably full of better teammates.

Viktor (the champion) has existed in the game for 13 whole years. Fans have had time to grow attached to his presentation, his aesthetic, and his machine herald swag—which is why Riot coming out of nowhere and hitting him with the twink beam to have him closer match Viktor (the TV character) hasn't gone down smoothly. Gone is the relatively square, jaded idealist and genius philanthropist with an obsession for cybernetic replacement. Arcane Viktor is here, no negotiations.

The community subreddit for the character, r/viktormains, has been having an especially normal one, calling a campaign to see his slightly buffer, chonkier appearance the "revert-lution". "Why are his hips so GRABBABLE?" cries one player in a thread lamenting his slender, effeminate frame, as another chimes in: "I won't stand his top erasure!! Where is the bulge???" I'm a particular fan of this "in loving memory" card, which mourns his memory as a "scientist, innovator, divorced and communist". May he be remembered.

And, look. While I'll always have a sensible chuckle over people losing their gourd, I think I'm on the players' side, here. At least, to a certain extent. Riot has the right to do whatever it wants with its IP and game, but it does feel harsh to unilaterally redesign a swathe of skins that people paid money for years ago. A botched graphical update is one thing, body-swapping stuff that cost actual cash is another. Here's some direct comparisons, courtesy of Remus on YouTube.

Riot does, at least, seem to be taking the feedback into account. As shared by user VrrSolo on the same subreddit, both the Creator and the Death Sworn Viktor skins have received touch-ups on the Public Beta Environment, League of Legends' test server. Namely, Riot's added more details and restored some of the chonkiness that Viktor fans had lost.

It's only a small step towards glorious reconciliation, though, with said subreddit responding with a lukewarm appreciation at best. If anything, this whole rework does seem a little poorly-handled. League of Legends' skins aren't exactly unified in their aesthetic—and there are plenty of skins that present alternate-canon versions of its roster. So why go back and reinvent the wheel when players could have both? Still, it looks like Riot's all-in on weaving Arcane into the game's universe, so here's hoping for some smoother inclusions in the future.

It’s been just over a month since Valve added a ranked mode—and just a few days since ranked became the only mode in Deadlock. The change has encouraged somewhat more serious Deadlock play, and it's great to have a way to track progress and flex competitive muscles. However, there are frustrating hurdles to taking Deadlock more seriously if you, like most players, aren't queuing up with a full stack of friends every night: Deadlock could really use a pre-game phase, and the pros agree.

Quick background: Most MOBAs, including Valve's own Dota 2, have a phase before the actual match where players take turns picking and banning heroes. This three minute window is typically used to figure out your team's game plan—assigning lanes, picking complementary heroes, etc. Deadlock, in a likely intentional decision to excise some complexity and downtime from the genre, has no real pre-game phase. There's no pick and ban (you just pick a few preferred heroes before matchmaking) and, as far as planning goes, you only get a few seconds on a rooftop before you’re speeding off to randomly assigned lanes.

Valve's calculated trimmings reduce the time between menus and playtime, but they don't gel with Deadlock's burgeoning competitive scene. With Deadlock in residence at the corner of MOBA street and hero shooter avenue, planning and tactics aren’t just a moment-to-moment concern, but a key part of building your team strategy before the game starts.

Instead of waiting for Valve to implement these core competitive systems in Deadlock, a grassroots movement of skilled players has taken it upon themselves to create their own competitive format. The most popular so far is Deadlock Fight Night: a weekly invite-only king-of-the-hill style tournament where the current reigning champions return to defend their title each week. With excellent casters and slick graphics, it’s a glimpse at a possible future of organized Deadlock as an esport, but more importantly: Deadlock Fight Night coordinates a pick and ban phase before every game. Organized by the tournament, the phase follows MOBA tradition, giving each team a single hero ban and then letting them trade off on picks—all done manually.

Each pre-game in Deadlock Fight Night is its own strategic tug-of-war, something I sorely miss each time I queue myself. Getting the opportunity to see that my opponents are bringing a Bebop so that I can suggest we pick a Viscous is both invaluable and a huge part of the strategic acumen that sucks me into MOBAs. Likewise, the opportunity to build my lane and team composition to function well together is totally lacking in Deadlock, as I’m just tossed into a team and lane automatically.

If I’m not with friends to dial in the team compositions we want or get the best duo lane before going to queue, there’s no chance to coordinate at all, and I’m stuck out on the curb in the Cursed Apple futilely trying to assemble a competitive matchup out of pure randomness.

The most frustrating games I’ve played have been ones where I felt like I was sabotaged from the start. It's just too common that myself and my five teammates all enter the match with our own notions of strategy that don't align even a little. Random team comps assembled by Valve regularly have glaring issues like a lack of late-game damage, few crowd control abilities, or no clear way to initiate fights. You can play or build around these issues of course (some chosen team compositions accept them knowingly), but having to adapt should be a last resort, or something I opt into. If I’ve made a mistake in picking my team composition, or if I’ve knowingly accepted a weakness and then have to adapt, I had agency in the choices that led to my situation. Deadlock's queue in its current state feels like driving an automatic when I’m used to a manual.

All three of the biggest facets of a pick/ban phase feel like missing components for Deadlock, and it’s no surprise that the budding pro scene has homed in on them. Seeing the battle of wills between top players, watching them adapt to an unexpected enemy pick or form their strategy around a key ban is the tense balancing act I crave. While I expect to have a lot less coordination and a lot more chaos when I queue with less than a full team, I still want more strategic freedom, and it’s just not there.

While we're still working with a very early version of Deadlock, and Valve likely has more updates to come to matchmaking, I am still left pining for the illusory ‘ghost of Christmas future’ version of the game I’ve seen.

To start, Viktor, one of the game's champions, is receiving a rework to match his character in Arcane more accurately—which applies to his visuals, audio, and backstory. He’ll look more like his model design in Teamfight Tactics, and his ultimate is getting altered to increase in size with every kill until it’s finished. All of Viktor's skins are also being updated to match his new look, but this does mean that his price is going up from 520 RP to 750 RP, so if you're yet to unlock him and don't want to splash the extra cash it's worth making the purchase now before the price increases.?

One of the other biggest changes is the addition of a new Noxus-inspired map to Summoner's Rift. The blue buff and river zones will still have a luscious forest-y look. But bases, red buff lanes, and main lanes themselves will adopt a new look, like something straight out of Noxus Prime. This visual overhaul will affect things within the Rift too, with minions and turrets taking on a new appearance, and even shopkeepers dressing differently to keep up with the new aesthetic. A different plant has been added to the Rift too: the Blood Rose. These will spawn around the spots where champions have died and will give your team a small XP boost, as well as a permanent stacking Adaptive Force buff.?

This map also introduces a new enemy to Summoner's Rift straight from Legends of Runeterra. Atakhan will spawn in the jungle after 20 minutes and target the lane with the most early kills. If no kills have been made, then the boss will spawn in the lane with the most damage dealt. Once 14 minutes have passed, Atakhan's pit will appear alongside two permanent walls to signify where he will target, giving you plenty of time to prepare to attack when he does take form. Not knowing where exactly Atakhan will spawn until you're a decent way into a game will definitely help to keep you on your toes, which is something I think Summoner's Rift has been lacking for a while.?

To add to this, the amount of damage done by champions and the number of kills in the game will affect which version of Atakhan spawns too. In a high-stakes, high-action game, Ruinous Atakhan will appear. When he’s defeated, your entire team will have the effects from Epic monster rewards permanently increased, and he will leave behind a field of Blood Roses for you to harvest.?

If you're having a particularly challenging game with low kills or damage, then Voracious Atakhan will spawn instead. As a reward for taking this less-threatening version down, your team will get a one-time rebirth buff instead and a permanent increase in gold from champion takedowns. It's not as significant a reward as you get for defeating Ruinous Atakhan, but it's still worthwhile if you're looking for some extra help, and frankly a less intimidating task.

What’s more, a new game mode is being tested in a few regions to replace Quickplay. Swiftplay is being rolled out as a more laid-back yet faster-paced version of Summoner's Rift, which aims to change the emphasis from dominating your opponent to developing your skills with your champion. It's still competitive (let's be real, it's impossible for any game of League of Legends not to be), but there's not as much on the line. Which should make Swiftplay perfect for new players who aren't ready for the trenches of Ranked, or anyone who just wants a fun game with their friends without getting fully involved.

As a result, many elements of the standard Summoner's Rift game are being altered in Swiftplay to make it easier for everyone to have a more relaxing experience. Sources of gold and XP will dish out more rewards as the game goes on, and players who are falling slightly behind the rest of the team, as well as support players, will benefit from increased rewards too. The timing of key moments in the game has been pulled forward, which should help to make the experience faster—so the likes of turret plating and Baron spawning will happen earlier on. The following regions will get access to Swiftplay as a replacement for Quickplay once this season rolls out:

• North America
• Latin America (North)
• Latin America (South)
• EU West
• EU Nordic & East
• Russia
• Brazil
• Turkey?
• Taiwan
• Vietnam

More regions will be added to the list if the game mode proves as popular as Quickplay currently is, but we don't know when exactly this might be. For the time being, any region not featured on the list will be able to play Quickplay as normal. ?

"This update includes a new version of the matchmaker," developer Yoshi says in an update post. "The matchmaking pools are no longer split between normal and ranked, there is only one primary matchmaking mode, and there are no limited hours." This change is great news for players who don't want to play ranked but still want to be on equal footing with their opponents, as now there'll also be MMR assigned to casual games. Although, the update to how ranked matches will take place seems like bigger news.

Previously, players could only queue for ranked matches for a couple of hours every day in the late afternoon. This short window of time often meant I just missed out on playing ranked games and, therefore, found it difficult to reach the required seven games per week to receive a rank update. At first, it was necessary for players to complete seven games to help Valve build a better idea of the skill spread across Deadlock's playerbase. It was also necessary to collect more data on individual players so the developers could place them accordingly in one of the 11 ranks.

Thankfully, this requirement has also now been removed in the latest update. "Badges will update immediately whenever you gain or lose enough MMR to change badges," Yoshi says. "You no longer have to wait a week or play a certain game count." However, there may be a monthly global rank reset to adjust for miscalculations caused by cheaters or influxes of new players. Yoshi confirms there will be less weighting put on matches taking place in off hours, like 5 am, when there's poorer match quality due to fewer players being online.

Furthermore, there are now no limits on party sizes for MMR consideration, although if you have a particularly wide spread of ranks in your party, then you'll probably encounter quite erractic matchmaking.

The last major change to matchmaking is the introduction of hero MMR. "When you queue, we will match you based on that hero's MMR. So if you are unfamiliar or play worse with a given hero, you will be put in an easier match than your usual."

Deadlock will place your skill for each hero according to the last 20 games you played with them. To see how you're doing with each hero, there will be a new UI that will show you what the matchmaker thinks your ranking for each is. Although this may change, as Yoshi does stress the devs would appreciate feedback on this particular feature.

I'm really happy to see hero MMR added to Deadlock. My skill gap between playing as Seven or Vindicta, heroes that I've put time and effort into improving on, compared to heroes like Kelvin or Grey Talon, who I don't play as often, is very noticeable. Previously, in order to retain or improve my rank, I'd almost always just stick with what I know. If I ever tried to branch out I'd almost always feel punished by the enemy team for picking a hero I was less familiar with. So this change will hopefully give me a better shot at honing my skills with some new heroes by placing me in matches that are on my level.

Yesterday's patch was a big one in general. It overhauled the Walkers’ attacks and defenses, added three new items, and introduced a new voice actor for the Patrons. It's always great to see these kinds of changes being made in Deadlock. Through these, the game has quickly changed from a fun MOBA that is scuffed around the edges to something that is surprisingly polished despite technically being in closed beta. All of these updates to matchmaking have remedied some of the issues I had with ranked play and seemed like really great quality-of-life changes for Deadlock—which I'm sure the community will appreciate, just as I do.

Today, however, it's an entirely different story. Picking a champion in an off-meta role, let alone building AD Lulu, will grant you a one-way ticket to report town, and you’ll be labeled a troll or a griefer.

Times have changed

It's no secret that League has changed over the years. Not only did the design of the Summoner's Rift map get updated, but Baron Nashor, jungle camps, and the Rift Herald got a makeover. On top of that, Riot Games is continuously tinkering with in-game systems such as dragon souls, platings, and bounties.

Since the world around League champions has changed, it's no wonder they have undergone a handful of changes themselves—in some cases just visual updates and icon upgrades, but others received major reworks. Although reworks in League typically involve quality-of-life changes and upgrades to the champion's kit, Riot has also been using them to remove different playstyles.

For example, old Master Yi had AP scaling for two of his abilities—Alpha Strike (Q) and Meditate (W). This allowed players to opt for an AP build which would revolve around nuking enemies with Alpha Strike and healing back the damage with Meditate. However, the idea of a wizard Master Yi has been completely gone since Patch 3.10, which removed AP scaling on Alpha Strike.

Patch notes or death notes?

Major reworks aren't the only culprit for the dying build creativity in League. In fact, Riot is gutting unique and creative builds regularly, almost every two weeks. Don't get me wrong, regular League patch notes are great for the health of the game, as they bring back to relevance long-forgotten champions and nerf dominant picks that are terrorizing players in Solo Queue.

But regular updates have also had negative repercussions on the state of League. In 2020, pro players started building the Death's Dance legendary item on marksmen as this would grant them 50 attack damage, 30 armor, 30 magic resistance, 10 percent cooldown reduction, and a unique passive which would instantly heal them for 15 percent of all damage dealt. This meta, however, didn't last long. Riot didn't like the idea of AD carries building a bruiser item for a bit more sustainability and Patch 10.23 reworked Death Dance. Since then, Death Dance has the Ignore Pain passive, which is tied to the post-mitigation damage taken (the damage you actually receive after magic resistance and armor). And since then, I never saw another AD carry build Death Dance.

This is one of many examples of exotic builds that have been quickly gutted by Riot's balancing team. Other victims include Smolder's W and Doran's Ring start, Fleet Footwork LeBlanc with Static Shiv rush, and Electrocute Nami. The most common life cycle of new builds in League boils down to this: the build gets discovered, players use (and abuse it), and Riot wacks it with a nerf hammer so that it's no longer viable.

Can we still flex?

Over the years, we've seen a drop in flex picks, or champions which can go more than one lane in League. Now, all champions fit into neatly organized boxes, and if there's any oscillation in that, Riot will, again, nerf it.

Pour one out for support Sett, one of the most egregious victims of Riot's commitment to balance. Even though Sett was originally designed as a top-lane bruiser and counter to ranged champions due to innate healing, players used to pick him up as a support. The trick was to grab movement speed runes—Phase Rush, Nimbus Cloak, Celerity, and Hextech Flashtraption. Since Sett has a strong early game, you'd be on the lookout for fights and skirmishes, and you'd use your Summoner spells to get a burst of movement speed to run down your enemies.

However, after nerfs to Phase Rush, Turbo Chemtank, and base damage, he is now a niche support pick you'll rarely see. Sett also used to be a strong jungle pick, until Riot changed the damage dealt to monsters and pushed him back to the top lane. Where once he offered lots of flexibility, now he's got a singular focus.

Where do we draw the line?

You might be thinking that all this creativity that Riot's trying to stamp out would only result in League teeming with broken champions and builds, making it even harder to balance than it currently is. That's true, to an extent. Giving free rein to player creativity while allowing every weird, overpowered build to stick around could be a nightmare for League's balance and become an existential threat to the game's competitive future—but there's a middle ground between this chaos and Riot's current approach.

Riot normally nerfs new, unique builds within a span of two weeks. This doesn't give the playerbase enough time to find a counterplay or counterpick. Instead, it would be far more interesting what would happen if Riot held off its nerf, at least for a couple more patches. Or if we would see Riot buff champions which are clear-cut counters. For example, let's say Smolder is beyond broken in front-to-back fights. Riot could nerf Smolder and be done with it. However, what if Riot left Smolder as is and instead buffed assassins, the type of champions that are designed to kill squishy marksmen?

For years, Riot has had the same approach to balance in League—nerfing powerful picks. This results in the meta often feeling stale, as you have to play one and the same champions to increase your odds of winning. Especially in the era of tier lists and guides for best builds, players are inclined to go with the strongest champions in their games. However, if Riot was to leave champions in a strong state and give players tools to counter them, League could become even more energetic and fun to play—especially for casual players.

Trapper is available to play in the Hero Labs now and has a kit that is not that dissimilar to heroes like Kelvin and Viscous, as it's largely used for stunning enemies and healing allies. When thrown, Trapper's first ability, Bottled Phantasmicide, leaves a pool of poison on the floor, which can damage enemies over time and slow them down if they walk through it. His next ability, Silktrap, also restricts players' movements by creating a thread of web between two surfaces that, if an enemy walks through, will slow them and inflict damage. The third ability, called Pest Barrier, supports teammates by granting them +200 spirit shield health.

There's already a ton of crowd control in Deadlock, and almost every hero has some way of stunning, trapping, or slowing enemies. For example, Grey Talon can deploy an immobiliser that confines opponents and then slows them down, and Seven's Static Charge ability can stun enemies for 0.9 seconds. So Trapper getting two crowd-control abilities out of four isn't unusual, especially as MOBAs tend to include a lot of crowd control anyway.

But Trapper's ultimate ability is far more interesting and terrifying. With Crawling Plague, he can unleash "a wave of spectral spiders that chase enemies and explode," ultimately dealing spirit damage. Deadlock is chaotic enough as is, but the idea of getting chased across the map by a clutter of spiders does not fill me with joy. There's also no arachnophobia setting in Deadlock as it stands, which may have to be remedied after this update.

Arachnophobia settings are a growing trend in videogames—they'll pop up just about anywhere a spider does. Recently, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 introduced an arachnophobia setting for Zombies, which just left the giant undead spiders as disembodied floating hunks of flesh. But other games have more quirky solutions to this phobia—like Lethal Company, which will replace spiders with the actual word spider.

Other than hordes of arachnids and loads of crowd control, the recent Deadlock update introduced tons of new features and changes. There are plenty of hero reworks, some item and weapon fixes, a few new building redesigns not that dissimilar to the work done on the Baroness Hotel during the Halloween patch, new private lobbies in the Hero Labs, and the addition of Quickbuy that lets players "right-click items in the shop to add them to your Quickbuy queue," one of the developers Yoshi says. "When you return to the shop, you will automatically purchase the items you can afford in your set order."

Obviously, you can check out all of these changes for yourself, including trying out the new hero in the Hero Labs—just try to be kind to any enemies or teammates who dislike spiders.

To that end, I’ve been tormenting my own crew with ideas, and observing the whole range of duo lanes my opponents have brought to bear against me. Every early lead, failed skirmish, and "unfortunate" muttered under my breath following an untimely death has been meticulously recorded, all to perfect the art of the duo lane. Whether you want a fresh comp to inflict on your pals in your next session, or something serious to lock down your ranked climb to the top of Eternus: I’ve got thoughts to share, and they’re all connected by colored strings on my bulletin board cleanly laid out for you to digest below.

Abrams and McGinnis

“Blue Collar Bullies”
Strength: Lane sustain and skirmishes
Weaknesses: Range disadvantage

Abrams and McGinnis are perfect for each other—since they’re who you hate to lane against, it’s natural they belong together. With Abrams' shotgun and the massive magazine on McGinnis’ minigun, they have strong weapons for securing and denying souls or hammering enemies who don’t tuck into cover. Even better, McGinnis’ Spectral Wall ability can force enemies into fights they don’t want while setting up Abrams for his Shoulder Charge to get a stun. Even in difficult lanes where the pair struggle, Abrams and McGinnis bring a whole bunch of sustain to the lane, with Abrams' Infernal Resilience and McGinnis' Medicinal Specter. Thanks to all the healing, they can weather tough matchups that would normally crush the lane and continue to keep up in souls.

How to overcome a tough lane: Be patient, and watch your opponents' cooldowns and stamina usage closely. Wait for them to use key cooldowns and expend stamina so that you know they won’t be able to escape your Spectral Wall and Shoulder Charge or won’t be able to win damage trades. Remember that you can win a lane just as well by effectively securing and denying souls as by racking up kills.

Ivy and Warden

"Beauty and the Beast”
Strength: Poke and crowd control synergy
Weaknesses: Strong bullet damage lanes, mobility

Ivy and Warden are a sneaky pairing, with how they complement each other found in how perfectly they set up each other's crowd control. Warden’s Binding Word gives enemies lots of time to escape before activating, which normally means he has to use it carefully to have a chance to land it. With Ivy by his side, however, she can watch for Warden to throw his Binding Word on an enemy, then follow up with Kudzu Bomb for the movement slow, or just use Stone Form to stun them to secure the root. Once an enemy is rooted, Ivy’s powerful but short-ranged submachine gun can shred them with a streak of free headshots alongside Warden’s. Once they hit their ultimate abilities, there’s also another sneaky tactic they can use, with Warden starting to channel his Last Stand ultimate and Ivy picking him up with her Air Drop ultimate to carry him to enemies.

How to overcome a tough lane: Be ready to pivot your Ivy build to support your Warden, even if you plan to build damage (especially spirit) in the long run, especially against lanes where Warden’s Willpower shield provides little value. Grabbing an early Divine Barrier, Rescue Beam, or Slowing Hex/Withering Whip active item can shut down enemies and set up your Warden far faster than the slower route to getting Ivy’s damage online.

Dynamo and Haze

“Geometry Jumpscare”
Strength: Burst damage and ultimate synergy
Weaknesses: Tanky and mobile enemies

Bringing some of the strongest ultimates in the game together in a single lane makes for a terrifying ultimate power spike, and between Dynamo’s Singularity and Haze’s Bullet Dance your laning opponents (or the entire enemy team) can be easy marks for a skilled and coordinated duo. But even before the deadliest circles in the game come online at the 3,000 soul mark, Dynamo and Haze are scary in the lane. Dynamo’s Kinetic Pulse knockup is perfect for helping Haze land almost a full magazine of shots on a helpless enemy, and it’s even easier to land if Haze first nails the target with her Sleep Dagger. Dynamo also brings much needed utility to Haze’s laning phase, since he can use Quantum Entanglement to help her dodge powerful enemy abilities and Rejuvenating Aurora to heal up and keep the pressure on.

How to overcome a tough lane: Let your Dynamo be the bait against crowd control heavy lanes—with Quantum Entanglement he can dodge a lot of abilities, thus setting up Haze to wreak havoc without fear of being stopped. Also, learn to recognize the strength of shoving your lane at the right time. This can give you time to slip next door to surprise your neighboring lane without missing many souls in your own—as long as you’re quick, even Haze on her own can be absolutely deadly showing up from her Smoke Bomb stealth.

Vindicta and Grey Talon

“Deadlock Royal Air Force”
Strength: Range and safety
Weaknesses: Sustain and being outpoked

The two champions of keep-away are a nightmare to face unprepared in a lane together, and with both Vindicta and Grey Talon able to fly—courtesy of their Flight and Rain of Arrows abilities—you can rain destruction down on enemies from a safe distance. With the long range of both heroes' weapons, you can easily poke enemies who leave themselves open, and even play well behind your guardian if your opponents are being aggressive or have the upper hand. Even better, Vindicta’s Stake and Grey Talon’s Immobilizing Trap synergize, with a landed Immobilizing Trap meaning a Snare to follow up will definitely land. Holding an enemy in place for multiple seconds (plus an easy time landing Charged Shot and Crow Familiar) is deadly enough, but once both Vindicta and Grey Talon have their ultimates they’re a terror to deal with, and missing even a bit of health can mean that a Snare or Immobilizing Trap is a death sentence, as Guided Owl and Assassinate both excel at finishing low health enemies.

How to overcome a tough lane: When you can’t overcome high pressure or sustain lanes with your range, be fully prepared to pivot that same range to securing and denying souls to make you keep up or pull ahead. Practice and learn the best spots to park behind your guardian with good cover, so if you’re pressured back you can still farm and poke as safely as possible. Never forget that both Grey Talon and Vindicta can quickly and easily affect other lanes even if their own is giving them a tough time, either by using their ultimates or through their exceptional range and mobility.

Shiv and Mo & Krill

“Bruise Brothers”
Strength: Sustain and dive potential
Weaknesses: Range disadvantage

It’s tough to overstate just how obnoxious having both Shiv and Mo & Krill together in the same lane can be for enemies, with both being durable brawlers packing shotguns. Mo & Krill elevates Shiv’s laning phase by providing the crowd control he needs to get ahead—with both Burrow and Combo locking down enemies for Shiv to wail on to his heart's content, and Sand Blast giving both characters the opening to escape bad situations or press advantages. Once they reach their ultimates, Mo & Krill’s Combo ability plus Shiv’s Killing Blow means any enemy mistake is a nearly guaranteed kill, followed by the opening to pressure the enemy guardian and rotate to an adjacent lane for more pressure. Dealing with a Shiv that’s ahead can be a nightmare, and Mo & Krill is one of the best ways to make sure he gets there and stays there.

How to overcome a tough lane: One of the most important lessons is to wait for key power spikes, especially with your ultimates. If you can’t force kills in your lane, look to use pressure and cooldowns to cause your enemies to miss last hits, and secure key side objectives like nearby souls from boxes and jungle camps. If you can reach your ultimates before your laning opponents, you can still nearly always secure at least one kill and start to build a lead.

The first rank I got in Deadlock was Ritualist 3, which, for context, is just below the middle rank of Emissary. The ranks progress like so: Initiate, Seeker, Alchemist, Arcanist, Ritualist, Emissary, and Archon, with the top four ranks, Oracle, Phantom, Ascendant, and Eternus, being considered hyper-competitive.

Ritualist is nothing special, but I didn't think it was too bad for someone who's never played a Moba before. I was pretty happy to be sat at what I thought was mid-skill level and content to hang there for the time being. But according to this week's ranked distribution, I'm not as good as I thought I was.

Most competitive games will show a bell curve when it comes to their rank distributions, and while that's still true of Deadlock, it does seem to be higher than usual. Most of the time, competitive games are slightly bottom-heavy, with the average player finding themselves at a much lower rank.

In Overwatch 2, for example, it is generally thought that the average rank is Gold, which has the most players, and that while Platinum also has a lot of players, these people seem to be above the 50th percentile point. As the ranks go Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, Grandmaster, Champion (which is a new rank), and then Top 500, getting into the higher ranks is really rare.

With this in mind, I thought that Ritualist was exactly where I should be at the start of ranked because it sat around mid, but I was wrong. There are only around 18,724 players currently ranked below me, while there are a whopping 55,638 players ranked above me—imagine finding out that you're worse than mid on a Wednesday morning, appalling.

Archon has the highest population, with 17,386 players, but below this, Emissary has 11,704, Ritualist has 11,250. Above Archon, Oracle has 10,884, and Phantom has 11,987. So you can find out if you're worse or better than average more or less by looking at your rank in relevance to Archon. Here are all the ranks with player counts if you're curious:

• Initiate: 8,897 players
• Seeker: 3,974 players
• Alchemist: 5,853 players
• Arcanist: 5,913 players
• Ritualist: 11,250 players
• Emissary: 11,704 players
• Archon: 17,386 players
• Oracle: 10,884 players
• Phantom: 11,987 players
• Ascendant: 3,717 players
• Eternus: 414 players

The bell curve may be slightly higher in Deadlock than in other competitive games, but that's not actually that unexpected when you consider this is only week three of ranked play being available. The developers previously mentioned that ranked play will be pretty fluid as they get a hold of matchmaking. " As such, medals will only be updated once per week to allow for analysis of a wide set of match data together at once for a more accurate review of your skill," developer Yoshi says.

However, the curve could be coming down a little as there are a few more people below Archon than last week. "A lot of people have been demoted, as shown by a sharp increase in number of players below Archon," one player points out. "[On the other hand] Phantom has shown a huge increase in players. I suspect there are still people who only play the minimum number of games to 'preserve' their ranks."

The slightly weird distribution also means that behind Eternus, the rarest rank in Deadlock is actually Seeker 1, as pointed out by gammaton32 in a Reddit post. Hopefully, the ranks will settle down to something more stable and expected as time goes on. But honestly, I kind of like the idea of the second-rarest rank in the game being one of the worst—I'd definitely tune in to watch an Ascendant to Seeker 1 challenge stream.

Now, mind you, I was nowhere near as good as the Grey Talons that I seemed to always go up against, but over time, I got pretty nifty with his ultimate, Guided Owl, which is basically a huge homing missile and immobilising trap ability that can hold enemy players still for 1.25 seconds. But even with all of his surprisingly powerful abilities, Grey Talon seemed like a less popular hero pick for most players.?

But Deadlock players are finally figuring out that Grey Talon shouldn't be ignored. "Fighting Talon is unbearable after the buffs, especially if he got fed," a player says. "You just can't get that guy even with improved armour, slowing hex, and knockdown."

Every time I try to square up I regret it from r/DeadlockTheGame

Three months ago, his pick rate was just 43.88%, with a win rate of 46.45%, according to tracklock, which placed the hero all the way down in D tier, but recently, we've seen Grey Talon rise to a 64.43% pick rate which places him in B-tier right on the cusp of A. While the win rate is still less than 50%, it has risen slightly as players learn what items work best with this hero.?

Grey Talon is better at long-distance fights. Like Vindicta, his second ability, Rain of Arrows, launches him up into the air, which can create much-needed distance between you and enemy players. In this sense, it'll really benefit you and your team if you prioritise items that'll strengthen Grey Talon's long-distance fights either by increasing headshot damage or by boosting your ability to escape incoming attacks.?

Getting Extra Stamina straight away alongside Sprint Boots will help with this, and then further on in the match, you should try to buy items like Ethereal Shift which sees you enter a void state in which you are invincible and unforgettable, as well as Sharpshooter or Crippling Headshot, which increase damage dealt by headshots and reduce your targets bullet and spirit resistance. If you're feeling dangerous, something like Glass Cannon, which reduces your health in return for the ability to stack damage with each hero kill (up to a max of seven times). There are plenty of fantastic community builds that can help you if you're not sure where to start.?

Unfortunately, Valve is trying to keep the poor hero down., Earlier this week, developer Yoshi announced a small update that saw Grey Talon receive a slight nerf. His base bullet damage has been decreased from 30 to 27, and his movement speed scaling from Spirit Power is also slightly reduced.?

Although Grey Talon is certainly underrated, he still isn't the strongest hero in Deadlock. "All this talk about Grey Talon has people forgetting who is actually the most ridiculous hero in the game," one player says. "Wraith + Shadow Weave is the true raid boss. Ult + Silence + fire rate from 3 + fire rate from Shadow Weave + increased card damage = 100 to 0 for any hero in the game on equal souls."?

Sat above Grey Talon in the tracklock rankings are the likes of McGinnis, Abrams, and Mo & Krill up in S-tier. Players have managed to master these characters faster than others and combine that knowledge with their overpowered and annoying abilities, and it's a recipe for disaster.?

McGinnis' ability to heal herself and her teammates with Medicinal Specter; Abram's ability to regen using Infernal resistance; and Mo & Krill's ultimate, which lets you grab onto an enemy hero, beat the ever-loving shit out of them, and then regain full health if they die in your arms are all traits that can make my blood-curdle in anger when I play against them.?

Grey Talon may not be able to compete with these heroes in a one-on-one fight, but that doesn't mean he's not strong enough to be a serious thorn in the side of any enemy team if you have the right build and keep a healthy distance from any Abrams, Shiv, or Lash players.?

It's pretty hard to miss the Halloween decorations in Deadlock. While the jack-o-lanterns are quite small, they are scattered absolutely everywhere across the map and stand out, especially because many of them have replaced urns and golden jars, which players love to destroy and ransack. But the pumpkins aren't the best part of this Halloween patch, even if they do look creepy.

One of my favourite new additions is all the new Halloween-themed masks that were added. So far, I've seen a clown, Frankenstein's monster, a jack-o-lantern, and a vampire. It seems like heroes get random masks every game, but for some reason, Vindicta almost always gets the clown mask (I'm not sure if that's a dig at her character or just a coincidental read on how I usually play her).

Most players actually seem to think that Vindicta suits the clown mask because of how much of a joke she is. "She's a tryhard character like Widowmaker from Overwatch," one player says. "She's bad at taking objectives 'cause she doesn't do a lot of damage to them. She's annoying to lane against because she can insta kill you once you're at half [health]. A lot of people play her and are bad with her, AND her win rate is low. So it's like rolling the dice with one on your team." All of that was coming from a self-proclaimed Vindicta one-trick, and honestly, after reading it, I kind of get the clown comparison now, as much as I hate to admit it.

Other than some seasonal trees and new sounds being added in this patch, the final, most exciting addition is a redesign of the Baroness Hotel. This building sits next to Greenwich Street (Green Lane) and, for a long time, just faded into the background. But now it's really a standout building, especially for players jumping into Deadlock for the first time after this patch.

On the outside, the hotel is now engulfed in ivy climbing up its stone walls, and it also has a brand new roof, complete with spires that raise the height of the building and will likely make it harder to traverse. However, some of the greatest reworks have been done to this building's interior. Before, the rooms (like most other internal spaces in Deadlock) were dark, grey, and lifeless, but now there are newly tiled floors, lanterns, windows, and some furniture.

It may not feel like anything huge or impressive, but these little changes to structural designs are actually really exciting. Back when Deadlock was first officially announced, we got to see some concept art of what Valve wanted the map to look like eventually, and cool doesn't even begin to describe it.

Deadlock is set in an occult version of New York, but apart from some typography and hero designs, you can't really tell that from just looking at the map. But this map concept art shows off the potential for a truly witchy yet stunning map, which I really hope Valve is able to realise one day, even if it happens one building at a time.

One of the best parts of Deadlock being in closed beta is that players are finding weird bugs and glitches they can exploit for some good laughs, and the latest is a doozy. Somehow, one player managed to use one of the new heroes' abilities to infinitely grow other characters.

The Deadlock player, who goes by Rasterise, uploaded a video of the new colossal glitch/ infinite character scaling, and it's just as impressive as it sounds. "Playing yesterday, we discovered a bug that allowed you to use Magician's 3 with colossus to increase a character's scale infinitely, or at least until they grow larger than the map and die instantly," Rasterise says.

Magician's 3 ability is known as Rabbit Hex, and it can transform a target or yourself into a small rabbit that can move much faster than other heroes but does take increased damage. Then there's Colossus, a Tier 4 vitality item that can provide bonus health, melee damage, and weapon damage to users. It also can grant bullet resist, spirit resist, and slow the movement speed of nearby enemies.

During a match in the Hero Lab, Rasterise explained that if you turn a hero into a frog (that's another one of Magician's abilities), just as the Colossus item stops working, the targeted hero gets bigger. This is something you can stack to make the biggest hero Deadlock's ever seen.

Most of onlookers were astounded, with one of them declaring: "This is the greatest magic trick I've ever seen." Another simply asked, "Why is she so fuckin bug lol." They probably meant to say big, but I'd forget basic spelling as well if a gigantic Lady Geist started charging towards me.

But it's not all fun and games. There are some serious drawbacks to using this glitch. "Cons: Hitbox changes for incoming damage only, so any cover is useless, zipline stops working, and the camera remains in the default position, so you can't see anything." Being big also doesn't change how fast you are, so watching a massive Lady Geist try to run to mid-boss just looks like how running in my dreams feels. The only pro is that it's "funny," which it really is, so fair play.

Unfortunately, the match ended in a loss because Lady Geist was too big for the map and kept getting killed by the sky box every time she respawned. It's a tough price to pay for greatness, but pioneers must sacrifice in the name of discovery.

I have no shame in saying that I'm a Seven player. I know he's not the most complex hero or very impressive, but I don't have the time or the strength to learn more than four heroes right now, and Seven is the easiest hero to grasp, so here we are.

Seven was also really powerful from the get-go, and has stayed pretty strong throughout Deadlock's closed beta, which is one of the reasons why most players find him pretty annoying to fight against. The skill ceiling is relatively low for a high-reward hero, making him a bit of a monster in average player pools. But the fun doesn't end there, because this latest update has given him a slight buff, with the damage per second of his ultimate Storm Cloud increasing from 110 to 120.

Other annoying heroes who have been buffed in the recent patch include Shiv and Bebop. However, Bebop's changes could be a nerf to some players as a lot of the changes revolve around the hero's damage stacks on the Sticky Bomb ability. This includes stacks no longer decreasing on death and earning stacks based on dying heroes hurt by Sticky Bomb damage with a 12-second buffer. Before this, players would automatically get stacks if the bomb hit anyone. So if you're able to get multiple kills, you'll be able to turn Bebop into a killing machine, but if you're in a difficult lane and can't quite manage to get any kills, then you'll probably have a hard time reaching anything higher than 50% on your bomb. But Bebop also gets a damage stack increase from 3% to 5%, spirit power damage scaling increases from 0.9 to 1.2, and Sticky Bomb cooldown reduces from 19 seconds to 18 seconds.

Then there's Shiv, probably one of the more terrifying heroes to be pitted against. Shiv's ability, Killing Blow, has got some serious buffs like the cast range increasing from 13 metres to 14 metres, rage per weapon damage increasing from 0.015 to 0.017, and the drain rate reduced from 0.3 to 0.25.

Paradox, McGinnis, Kelvin, and Grey Talon also all got various changes that weakened their abilities or increased their cooldowns. But one hero who is absent from this list, who I always like to see get a bit of tweaking, is Jacob Lash. There's nothing worse than going 1v1 against a Paradox or a Kelvin and almost getting a kill only for Lash to swoop in from nowhere, pick you up, throw you back down into the ground, and then beat you to a bloody pulp. So it would be great for this hero to get a couple of adjustments, even if his ground strike was weakened just a little bit.

Although it seems like most players don't want to see Lash change at all. "Once again, not a word about Lash," one player says. "Imagine adjusting Lash. Icefrog isn't a fucking idiot; he knows Lash is perfect. Man, what a character. What a good video game character. Shout out to Jacob Lash." Spoken like a true Lash player.

The six new heroes added are Calico, Holliday, Magician, Viper, Wrecker, and Fathom, who was originally named Slork. It was a bold and innovative name, and I can't figure out why Valve had decided to change it, but there's no use crying over spilled milk, so we'll all just have to make the best of the situation and promise to only refer to him as Slork.

You'll be able to play all of these heroes in the Hero Labs, a new experimental mode that lets players with over 50 games play matches with an extended cast of heroes and give feedback on new hero designs. The new heroes included in this can have placeholder names, models, effects, and even abilities, which gives me hope that Slork's new name isn't permanent.

Out of all of the new heroes, Calico is the one I want to like the most. Her hero background is very impressive: she was "granted the dubious honour of being named Time Magazine's most dangerous woman on the planet." Plus, all of her abilities revolve around cats. Her primary abilities include Sekhmet's Spirit, which lets her send an explosive spectre cat to attach onto enemies, Pounce which gives her the ability to leap at a target, and Nekomata Ward, which lets her deploy a cat statue that'll track enemies and attack anyone Calico recently damaged. Calico's ultimate ability, Queen of the Shadows, is also incredibly cool as it surrounds her in shadows, turning her invisible so she can attack enemies from out of nowhere.

Calico was quite fun to play, but I definitely need to get better at faking out enemies with Nekomata Ward and learn how to disengage from fights quicker if I want to make an impact playing as them.

Then there's Slork (otherwise known as Fathom), who can spray scalding water onto enemies, lurch forward to do damage, defer incoming damage temporarily, and has an ultimate that lets him throw a harpoon that can latch onto a surface and pull foes in. Slork's third ability, deferring damage, is something of an unsung hero. I cannot count the times in which I've been so close to making it out of a fight, only to die just before getting to safety. Being able to defer incoming damage even for a short time could give me the moment I need to survive near-death encounters, regain health, and fight back.

Holliday's abilities are to launch an explosive powder keg, place a jump pad, get extra damage for headshots and lasso enemies to drag them behind you. Magician can fire a bolt of magic, summon a carbon copy that can also attack enemies, curse a target to turn into a little rabbit, and swap their position with an enemy player. Wrecker also has some fantastic abilities, like creating a giant scrap projectile, stunning enemies, firing out the consumed remains of dead players, and finally, creating a shadow copy of yourself that you can use like a remote-controlled helicopter.

Last but not least, Viper, the lizard hero, has a pretty interesting gimmick: sliding. If you slide in Deadlock, you get infinite ammo. So, to make the most of this, you can extend your slide by building stamina and speed or learning movement combos like dash-slide or dash-jump. With many heroes, sliding is more convenient than necessary, but with Viper, it's a must.

Viper's mag is tiny—with 18 bullets, it would be hard to win a one-on-one fight without extending your ammunition by sliding. But to even things out a bit, Viper does have a slightly longer slide than most other heroes, and their gun does a ton of damage. So far, all of Viper's public builds have worked to beef up stamina and speed. I've found that the build Don't Stop Moving works really well to give Viper a fighting chance against more aggressive enemies. "This build focuses on moving around and constantly sliding while fighting for the 50% bullet evasion+infinite ammo," the description says. "Your venom (2) is your finisher and is extremely powerful on low hp enemies."

The Hero Lab is only open for a few hours each day, and so far, there have been a couple of issues with matchmaking, but the problem isn't poor connections or unstable servers. Actually, the real problem is man-made. "The Hero Lab is a cool idea, but so far, half the time, people leave as soon as they don't get a new hero," an admin on Deadlock Intel says. I've had some luck playing new characters, but a lot of the Hero Lab games I play are just like my usual roster of heroes. Playing regular characters may not be as fun as experimenting with the new ones, but it's still a welcome break from ranked play, so I'm not complaining.

Playing hard support in League of Legends or Dota is like carefully guiding four toddlers through a construction site. The social dynamics are putrid, and I’m pretty sure it’s a Terms of Use violation for babies to be here anyway. So for the 13-ish years I’ve played MOBAs, I’ve consistently avoided support like the plague. Until a certain neutron star-slash-college professor changed everything.

Dynamo is built different. Dynamo does it all. He leads from the front, single-handedly ends team fights with the click of a button, and racks up a hoard of wealth with a healing aura in one hand and a headshot dispenser in the other. 顿别补诲濒辞肠办’蝉 systems enable Dynamo (and the game’s other supports, perhaps to a lesser extent) to explore new heights of agency in a genre that typically serves selfless team players bland action and relative bankruptcy.

This town is big enough for all six of us

With its still nascent meta, 顿别补诲濒辞肠办’蝉 roles are a bit more elastic than Dota’s gold priority positions and League’s rigid lane-by-lane setup, so I should note what I mean when I say support. Where a bruiser or carry might focus on farming the entire game to buy high-power items necessary to excel in their role, a support focuses more on healing items, utility, and initiation tools. While any character can buy a bunch of attack power and become a carry of sorts, supports leverage a kit which doesn’t depend on these items to be powerful. The way Deadlock approaches farming and itemization are crucial in making Dynamo such a, well, dynamo.

In the early minutes of a match, souls are duplicated between lane partners, and later in the game they’re shared. Not only can a support character help their carry farm and deny creeps, finally participating in a dimension of the game they normally miss out on, they also get rewarded for it with income comparable to that of their teammates. And because items are split into different categories with caps on each one until later in the game, you’re not only free to—but expected—to dip into some powerful items which boost your mobility, grant extra damage on headshots, and so on.

And crucially, you’ll never have to be the only adult in the room buying wards for a witless team; there are no wards to be bought! The game’s long sightlines, over-the-shoulder camera and vertical map are ill-suited to Dota and League’s vision ward system, so there’s no extra gold sink weighing down the support player as an assumed burden.

This might all sound like 顿别补诲濒辞肠办’蝉 supports play an awful lot like carries, and they kind of do. But these sea changes never inhibit your ability to play a supportive role or force you to take the lead—rather, they allow you to participate in those parts of the game that are usually reserved for the guy willing to drop a “mid or feed” some five seconds after the draft pick starts.

Hot for teacher

Dynamo embodies that marriage of support and carry playstyles. His suite of abilities read pure support: he’s got a knockup which sends enemies gormlessly into the air, he can teleport an ally to safety, and he can stow away his gun to heal in an area of effect around him. His ultimate is unsurprisingly the focal point of his kit, spawning a huge black hole which pulls nearby enemies into his orbit, rendering them bunched up and vulnerable to devastating combos. If you’re familiar with Overwatch’s Zarya or Dota 2’s Enigma, you know an ability like this is a pillar of chronically clippable, tournament-winning wombo combos.

But upon closer inspection Dynamo is less teammate-dependent than you might imagine. That knockup can be upgraded to shred enemy bullet resistance. The teleport reloads your gun and provides a fire rate boost to yourself and whatever ally you take along. His heal, when fully upgraded, returns use of your gun while channeling, and his gun is a pretty threatening automatic pistol that can melt enemy heroes with the right items.

At any point in the game past the first few minutes, these strengths (in tandem with 顿别补诲濒辞肠办’蝉 generous income mechanics and different item categorizations) allow Dynamo to shift rapidly from carry to support to hybrid, go all-in on a headshotting facemelter build, or swear fealty to the nearest killstreaking Pocket, committing fully to healing items and initiation tools. It’s the first time in a MOBA I consistently explore every corner of the item shop, looking for how I might tailor my chosen character to the situation, rather than just find the biggest damage stick and weld it to my auto-attack for a higher kill-bad-guy number.

I think all of 顿别补诲濒辞肠办’蝉 utility-minded characters—Kelvin, Ivy, Viscous, and so on—boast build variety and high impact in a similar capacity to Dynamo. But he hits that sweet spot so thoroughly that he pulled me away from my favorite role in this genre and changed how I approach buildcraft in these games. This single character has me eagerly anticipating Deadlock's future support heroes, curious how they might further bend genre conventions beyond their standard pliability.

"Exalted is a new skin tier that fits into what we define as a 'luxury good' last December," a developer says in a blog post. "Over this past year, we've continued to refine what luxury goods are and where they exist in our catalog. Exalted skins are for players who want hyper-inclusive skins."?

At the end of last year, Riot announced that it would be restructuring its business model. Despite saying that "League is about playing better, not spending money" in that blog post, the publisher also announced a higher tier of skins that would be classified as "luxury goods." These come in the form of Mythic Variants like Dark Cosmic Erasure Jhin and Breakout True Damage Ekko, which are typically $200/ ?154.?

So, the newest skin that Riot has released to celebrate the upcoming Arcane season 2 will fall under the above category. Arcane Fractured Jinx has " two distinct models across three different forms and VFX that highlight her story." Plus, there's a unique voice-over for each form, and you can switch between each version at any time in-game by using a slot-machine mechanic controlled by Jinx's Ctrl+5, and if you hit big (which is guaranteed), you change forms.?

"These forms will also be reflected across three HUD overlays for Jinx's passive, which reflect some of her experiences from Season One and some from Season Two," the blog post says. "We really wish we could show you more right now, but, again, spoilers."?

But the thing is that you can't get the new Jinx skin by buying outright—instead, you need to use the Sanctum. "When we were designing how you would acquire exalted skins, we considered making them a set price," Riot says. "However, we decided to pursue another way that would allow players who may not want to commit to a larger price the chance to get them at a lower investment—so we built a new system called the Sanctum with that in mind."?

In the Sanctum, players will use a new currency called ancient sparks to win prizes from a pool of rewards. There'll be the new Jinx skin (which is classified as S-tier content) alongside other content like select skins, exclusive paragon chromas (A-tier content), or just mythic essence (B-tier content). The drop rates for each tier range from 0.5% to 10% to 89.5%.?

You can get ancient sparks for 400RP (in-game League currency), which translates to $3/ ?2.50. But, if you want a better chance of getting the Jinx skin, you can invest 32000RP, which clocks in around $246/ ?205, as that'll give you 80 rolls outright, which is apparently enough to score the skin.?

This policy does seem like a wolf in sheep's clothing. Even if there is "bad-luck protection," which is meant to "make sure you're never too far from the item you want," according to Riot, this still seems pretty iffy and not far off from the practice of loot boxes. This practice has been removed from most major games like Overwatch as it's seen as a form of gambling or, at the very least, predatory.?

"Skins are the primary way we monetise League," the blog post says. "The revenue from skins, especially those at higher price points, allows us to invest in areas like new modes, champions, and further explorations in the narrative like the Spirit of Hearth Home minigame. We care about making a great game above all else, and your investment gives us the means to make these awesome experiences."

But even if expensive skins may be the best way to keep the lights on for League, players still aren't very happy with the new tier. "I want this shit regulated out of existence," one player says. "Having this kind of gacha shit should make your game 18+ rated by default."?

A League of Legends subreddit has also been trying to piece together Riot's thought process recently. "Make ultimate skins, drop quality ever since lux, make exalted tier, still less content than lux, 10x the price, profit," another player points out. Some players also touched on the fact that this new skin tier is coming at a time when Riot has just laid off a ton of talented artists responsible for making skins: "Also firing a lot of talented and good artists, skin developers, etc. too… [Riot] is losing their mind over whales who would spend hundreds of money on a skin…"

One of the artists affected by the recent round of Riot layoffs was even Ben Rosado, who was responsible for loads of legendary skins, including the $500 Ahri skin that was made to celebrate esports player Faker. "These were some of my best years of life, but now it's back to the job board, Rosado says in an X post.

The exalted skin tier has definitely come at a bad time for League of Legends, and it'll be interesting to see how players react to chasing exalted skins in the Sanctum to see how easy it is to get the cosmetics you want or if there's mostly just filler on offer.?

Word of the layoffs came in a message posted on X by Riot co-founder Marc Merrill, who said Riot "has made changes to our teams and how we work to make sure we can keep improving the League experience now and for the long-term."

"As part of the changes, we've made the tough decision to eliminate some roles," Merrill wrote. "This isn't about reducing headcount to save money—it's about making sure we have the right expertise so that League continues to be great for another 15 years and beyond. While team effectiveness is more important than team size, the League team will eventually be even larger than it is today as we develop the next phase of League."

In a follow-up post, Merrill said "success isn’t about throwing more people or money at a challenge," and that the real priority is "is having the right team, right priorities, and a sustainable approach to delivering what players need."

"If we’re solving the wrong problems, more resources won’t fix it," Merrill wrote. "It’s about building smarter and healthier, not just bigger."

A Riot representative told PC Gamer that 27 developers on League of Legends are being laid off, along with five people in Riot's publishing business. The cuts come less than a year after Riot laid off 530 employees and closed its Riot Forge program, which it launched in 2019 to make singleplayer League of Legends games with external studios.?

CEO Dylan Jadeja said at the time that Riot had become "a company without a sharp enough focus" and with too many projects underway that weren't paying off, but added that "we’re not doing this to appease shareholders or to hit some quarterly earnings number—we’ve made this decision because it’s a necessity. It's what we need to do in order to maintain a long-term focus for players."

The videogame industry has laid off thousands of developers since the beginning of 2023, as the heady "stay at home and play games" early days of the Covid-19 pandemic have waned. September 2024 alone saw cuts at studios including Mountaintop, Airship Syndicate, Evening Star, Microsoft, Midnight Society, Lost Boys Interactive, Ballistic Moon, and Rocksteady, while Hi-Rez Studios and Cryptic Studios have made layoffs in October.

"We've been experimenting with a different approach to ranked during early development, we expect to iterate on it in the future," a Valve developer known as Yoshi says in a blog post. "The focus of this mode will be on concentrating players into specific time windows where they can opt into games where the primary focus is game quality."?

There's an updated UI after you select Play after the recent update which, instead of just throwing you into a casual match, lets you choose between the standard mode, against bots, private bots, sandbox mode, a custom match, and soon enough, ranked play.?

Ranked play will open on Tuesday, October 15, at 7 pm BST/ 3 pm ET/ 12 pm PT, which means players still have time to prepare themselves for the upcoming challenge. You need to complete 50 matches in Deadlock before you're let into ranked play. 50 may not seem like a lot, but Deadlock matches can go on for an age (I've been in hour-plus games before), so if you haven't hit that number yet, you should probably play some Deadlock over the weekend. But if you have any "behaviour-related restrictions," then it doesn't matter how many games you've played—you're barred from entry.?

I've been eagerly waiting for some kind of improved matchmaking for Deadlock since I first joined the beta a few months ago. I still find myself in games that seesaw between crushing the other team and overwhelming defeat, so getting a system that groups players a bit better is definitely a welcome change. However, it's important to remember that it's still in development, so ranked play won't be as dynamic as most players are probably used to.?

"Every Tuesday at 7 pm BST, we will run an algorithm that calculates everyone's performance together at the same time based on the games you've played, how the opponents you played against ended up faring in subsequent games, etc," Yoshi says. "As such, medals will only be updated once per week to allow for analysis of a wide set of match data together at once for a more accurate review of your skill (rather than a fixed numerical addition/subtraction on a per-game basis)."

You will also have to play seven games if you want to get a medal the following week: "In order to make sure there is enough data to cross-reference with other players, you must play at least seven games in order to be eligible to receive a rank for that week," Yoshi explains. "If at any time you didn't have seven games played in the previous week, your medal will be marked as undefined until you play enough and earn a new medal the following Tuesday." So there'll be no rank stagnation for all the players used to climbing to a high rank and then just sitting there waiting for the next season.?

There are 11 medals in total and six levels within each of these. We don't know what these will be yet, but I'm hoping for some alchemical reference, given Deadlock's magical nature. After you get a medal, then you'll only be matched with others with the same rank as you. While better matchmaking is welcome progress, it will be interesting to see how this restriction impacts queue times—but that's a problem for another day.?

The only major problem with ranked play I have so far is that you can't group up with friends—it'll be a solo experience for now, but hopefully, we'll be able to climb with friends soon.?

You'll also only be able to queue at certain times: "[The queue] will be open from 1 pm-4 pm and 7 pm-10 pm in the respective time zones every day," Yoshi says. "Each region will have multiple time zones you can select from to find what best fits your schedule (you can only change your selection once per week). Players will be automatically assigned the server in that region that provides the best ping for the players in the match." I got to choose between West and East EU times.?

I'm excited to see what Deadlock's new ranked play will be like. I do expect some chaotic matches for the first week while everyone's still finding their footing, but hopefully, after that, we'll all be able to just stay in our respective lanes and be happy with that.?

Over time this aversion became a habit, and my eyes simply glazed over Deadlock's active items, rarely if ever considering them despite what popular builds recommended I buy. The dam finally broke for me a month ago when I bought Warp Stone out of raw frustration at my inability to catch mobile and fleeing enemies, and within minutes I was hooked on my newfound ability to teleport around no matter which hero I'm maining at the moment. My fear over additional buttons was logical, but unfounded, because 顿别补诲濒辞肠办’蝉 active items are often integral to rounding out your character and adapting to opponents doing the same.?

My button-itis almost robbed me of one of the most important, rewarding aspects of Deadlock builds. So I’m here to say: don’t follow in my footsteps and sleep on 顿别补诲濒辞肠办’蝉 active items. I’ve highlighted some of the ones I feel are the most useful and the circumstances you’ll want to consider investing in them yourself.?

Warp Stone

Rating: Universal

The Swiss army knife of Deadlock, because what situation doesn’t benefit from an instant teleport? Using Warp Stone will blink you forward 11 meters in whatever direction you’re looking and give you a 30% boost in Bullet Resist for five seconds afterwards, making it perfect for closing with a fleeing enemy, disengaging from a bad fight, or setting up the perfect ultimate. Seven can use Warp Stone to blink to a great spot for Storm Cloud, Pocket can do similarly with his ultimate Affliction, and of course there’s Haze’s Bullet Dance. Likewise, characters who tend to chase or play hit-and-run styles like Shiv or McGinnis can also really benefit from increased mobility. Especially consider Warp Stone if you’re building primarily Spirit on your character, since Warp Stone takes up a Bullet slot, which is a lower value spot for most Spirit builds, so you can fill that slot with a 3,000 soul item that gives you a blink every 16 seconds.

Echo Shard

Rating: Hero Dependent

If Warp Stone is a Swiss army knife, then Echo Shard is the repeat button on your favorite song. For 6,200 souls, you get a 21-second cooldown item that resets the cooldown of your most recently used non-ultimate ability–essentially meaning you can double cast an ability every 21 seconds. Make people float with double Tornado’s on Mirage, throw your Mini Turrets out quickly, or coax your opponents right back to sleep if they’ve woken up too early from your Sleep Dagger. More than just a tool, Echo Shard is the cornerstone of a wide variety of heroes who can build around its unique ability to double down on powerful abilities, like Bebop’s infinitely stacking Sticky Bomb, or McGinnis putting up two Spectral Wall’s at once.

Debuff Remover

Rating: Situational

You will never need Debuff Remover until you do, and then you’ll be incredibly glad for it. A whole bundle of enemies apply debuff effects to your character, but there are a few who will hit you so hard (or for so long) that you’ll need a hard counter just to save your life. Shiv’s Serrated Knives ability applies a long lasting bleed that can stack, while Infernus is all about stacking burn damage—both good targets for Debuff Remover if they’re getting ahead of your team in Souls. Ahead of the pack, though, are two killer abilities that frequently need to be debuffed: Pocket’s ultimate Affliction burdens you with an 18 second long damaging debuff that can also reduce your healing by 60%, and while it can’t kill you outright, it will certainly get you killed. Bebop’s Sticky Bomb ability—which counts down for a few seconds before exploding for permanently stacking damage—can be deadly in Spirit builds, even worse if he’s using Echo Shard to double it up. Debuff Remover is your one-and-done defense against all of these and more, every 48 seconds.

Rescue Beam

Rating: Universal

The support player's best friend. While characters like Dynamo come with supportive abilities, you can take them—and your friends—to soaring new heights with a Rescue Beam. Using it on an ally will tether them to you with a beam that heals them for about a quarter of their health over 2.5 seconds—a fairly strong heal. What really makes Rescue Beam invaluable is its alternate ability: You can reactivate it during the 2.5 second channel to instead pull your tethered ally toward you—allowing you to yank allies out of losing situations or set them up for huge plays. It’s a must have active item for any character that can use their mobility to take advantage of it, especially characters like Ivy and Kelvin,?

Unstoppable

Rating: Situational

Never get knocked out of your ultimate again. Whether it’s Haze’s Bullet Dance or Bebop’s Hyper Beam, knowledge isn’t half the battle to dealing with them: it’s using stuns to interrupt them. That’s where Unstoppable enters the picture (unfortunately, if you’re one of the characters trying to stun Haze out of her ultimate) to shake things up. Using Unstoppable gives you six seconds of immunity to crowd control, including stuns and silences. Although you can’t use Unstoppable when you’re already stunned or silenced, as you get into the late stages of the game, activating an Unstoppable before a critical ultimate or big play will make the difference between a win or a loss.

Knockdown

Rating: Situational

On the other side of the coin is an active item that helps you deal with powerful channeled ultimates and mobile characters who can get out of your reach, like Vindicta or Lash. It can be a pain to deal with characters that can immediately get airborne, leaving your gun at a disadvantage and making it difficult or impossible to hit them with abilities, and many characters don’t have the crowd control to deal with something like a Seven channeling his Storm Cloud, which is where Knockdown comes in. Usable every 48 seconds, Knockdown has a massive 45m cast range in all directions, so you can easily use it to go duck hunting. Just be aware that once you use it on an enemy, there’s a 2 second windup before it goes off, so it’s not going to instantly save you from any ongoing damage from the enemy you throw it at—it’s best to use it and then dive for cover until it goes off.

Ethereal Shift

Rating: Situational

Have you ever felt like you just needed to survive a few extra seconds and you’d have been able to turn everything around? Ethereal Shift gives you 3.5 seconds of invulnerability, protected from all damage and effects. Using Ethereal Shift gives you a guaranteed, but fleeting window to pop a powerful ability—like Pocket’s ultimate Affliction—and then protect yourself immediately after while your team takes advantage. Likewise, Ethereal Shift can buy you valuable time when enemies dive onto you for a "sure" kill, going invulnerable leaves them stranded with your allies around you, or lets you dodge a dangerous attack like the explosion of Bebop’s Sticky Bomb ability. With Ethereal Shift available every 32 seconds, you’ll be able to use it even in small skirmishes knowing it will be available again soon.

Silence Glyph

Rating: Hero Dependent

One of the most powerful tools for dealing with persistent and evasive characters like Pocket and Shiv, Silence Glyph damages an enemy and silences them for three seconds, locking them out of abilities. Landing a Silence Glyph on a hero that relies on abilities to escape or deal the majority of their damage is often as good as landing the killing blow. Inversely, a diving character like Shiv can use Silence Glyph to ensure a slippery enemy like Wraith can’t escape them or crowd control them by using their own Silence Glyph when they run into the back ranks of the enemy team.

Thankfully, between deep dives into strategy chats, tournament footage, community opinions, and hundreds of hours of gameplay, 顿别补诲濒辞肠办’蝉 pecking order is starting to take shape. RIsing from the foggy mists of MOBA island, down near hero shooter bay, a Deadlock tier list sits on an amorphous throne, prepared to guide your picks and remind you why you might be struggling in lane. Just remember that the team at Valve is tweaking Deadlock regularly, sometimes multiple times a week, so this list is as fluid as Viscous himself.

The best Deadlock characters in 2024, in short

• Abrams: Durable and packed with crowd control
• Dynamo: A versatile team player
• Haze: A stealthy brawler who scales

S Tier heroes

A Tier heroes

B Tier heroes

C Tier heroes

We know Valve is using it: Fletcher Dunn, an engineer who's been with Valve for over a decade, has been posting his "ChatGPT wins" on X, saying today that OpenAI's large language model is an "amazing" tool.

Dunn is more or less using ChatGPT as an advanced search engine, and the interaction that amazed him recently saw him describe a hypothetical kind of algorithm he wanted to use for Valve's MOBA-shooter, Deadlock, and receive an accurate recommendation for a real algorithm matching his specifications. The algorithm ChatGPT recommended is in fact now being used in Deadlock matchmaking, according to Dunn.

"I'm gonna keep posting my ChatGPT wins, because this thing keeps blowing my mind, and I think there are some skeptics who don't get how amazing this tool is," he wrote. "A few days ago we switched Deadlock's matchmaking hero selection to the Hungarian algorithm. I found it using ChatGPT."

Dunn acknowledges that he could have found the same answer with the right Google search terms, but says that the point is that he didn't have to: ChatGPT immediately returned what he was looking for even though he described it vaguely.?

"'Find me this thing that I don't really know the right search terms for, but I will attempt to describe' is just a *killer* app," he said in a reply to another poster. "If it is wrong or hallucinates (which does sometimes happen), you'll figure that out pretty quickly."

This use of ChatGPT reinforces something I suspected when I covered that survey back in January: That scattered instances of generative AI being used to create final videogame art or replace voice actors are really the tip of the iceberg. Mostly, I think developers are using generative AI in ways we aren't going to see directly, such as by using ChatGPT as a search engine, or to write code, or as an administrative tool, or by using image generators during the concept stages.

In January, Steam added a rule that developers must disclose generative AI use when they submit their games, and most of that information is displayed to consumers on store pages. None of Valve's own games feature Steam generative AI disclosures, Deadlock included. Using ChatGPT as a natural language search engine arguably doesn't count as the kind of thing that needs disclosing, though Valve's rules call for developers to tell it about "any kind of content (art/code/sound/etc) created with the help of AI tools during development."

Dunn isn't sure whether ChatGPT will remain as useful as he finds it now. In early September, he predicted that we're in "a ChatGPT golden age," and that the LLM's capabilities will go downhill as training data is lost to copyright challenges or becomes polluted by its own output. For now, though, Dunn says that he permanently keeps ChatGPT open in a Chrome tab.

"I am kind of conflicted because it is often replacing asking the question to another human IRL, or at least tweeting it out to the virtual braintrust," he said. "I guess this is good (the whole point?), but it's just another way for computers to replace human interaction."

ChatGPT maker OpenAI just raised an incredible $6.6 billion in a new funding round as it, as AP reports, turns further toward profit-making. The company claims that its new ChatGPT o1 model is capable of "reasoning" through problems.

The layoffs are being made "across Hi-Rez," Chisam wrote on X, but "will disproportionately impact those in marketing and publishing roles, as well as some from our Evil Mojo, G&A, and Titan Forge divisions. The game team roles impacted disproportionally affect our team working on cosmetic skin content and system features."

Hi-Rez split itself into multiple separate studios in 2018: Titan Forge develops the Smite games, while Evil Mojo does Paladins. G&A is presumably Hi-Rez's general and administration division.

"This move follows a comprehensive review of our strategy and operations," Chisam continued. "In the game division, we have decided to concentrate our efforts entirely on Smite 2, outside of small teams supporting light updates for Paladins and Smite 1.

"Within Smite 2, we are almost exclusively prioritizing gameplay development in the near term—such as new modes and gods—as well as quality improvements—over some cosmetic and monetization features previously planned in the run-up to the game’s free-to-play launch next year."

Smite 2 launched into early access on Steam in August to decidedly mixed reviews: PC Gamer contributor Sarah Richter found it promising but lacking in some meaningful ways, particularly for newcomers to the series. It's also entering into a newly resurgent MOBA milieu, which is even more challenging thanks to Valve's recent entry into the field with Deadlock.?

Smite 2 has been putting up pretty okay concurrent player numbers for an early access MOBA, but notably it's still lagging well behind the original Smite, suggesting that quite a few players aren't interested in making the move at this point.

Chisam acknowledged the "real human impact" of the layoffs, saying each person being put out of work "is a talented and dedicated professional who has poured their heart and soul into our games," and that the cuts "reflects a failure in my leadership, and one for which I take personal accountability." How exactly he will take accountability was not specified, however.

"While these changes are difficult, we believe they are necessary and we will emerge stronger from them," Chisam wrote. "We appreciate your continued support and understanding during this challenging period, and the support and thanks you give those employees who are impacted and have given so much of their passion and time to help entertain us all."

"I made a Deadlock build calculator," alayton says. "It's actually more than just a build calculator, but that's the big headline feature right now. There's also a complete list of heroes, abilities, and items, with data from previous versions being preserved. The big plus here is that this data is being read directly from the client, so updates are fast, easy, and cover everything."?

The website's name is Mutex, and it lets you pick any hero you like and start creating various item builds. Instead of having to go into Deadlock's sandbox to see how your item choices will impact it, you can just use Mutex to quickly add and subtract them. The weapon, vitality, and spirit stats will change as you mess around, so you'll learn quickly how different items affect your stats.?

"We've all used the sandbox for playing with builds, and this can't directly replace that," alayton says. "There's no way to import builds into the game currently—but this does let you play around with builds when you can't (or just don't want to) run the game.?

"I approached builds a bit differently. Instead of being a step-by-step, buy this, then this, etc type of system, it's focused on seeing the effect of a specific set of items on your hero, whether that be your hour-long endgame goal or a more typical 25 to 30k soul target. It does still allow for adding early game and alternate items, but they aren't included in the stat calculations unless they're in the 12 main slots."?

You can create builds in the game's sandbox mode, and it'll give you plenty of information on stats and weapon status, but I found that playing around with Mutex is easier and quicker. Whenever I'm actually on Deadlock I don't have time to mess around with builds as I'm usually playing with my lovely (yet impatient friends) so instead I'll use someone else's custom build.

The custom builds in Deadlock are pretty incredible. Some of my favourites for Seven include "You are Literally Him: A Seven Guide" and "7EUS, AOE God," but you can easily browse all the public builds and see which ones tickle your fancy. But when I pick someone else's build, I usually don't actually read into what each item does, I'll have my favourites and then just blindly go along with whatever the creator suggests. Being a MOBA, where tailoring your build to your current match is kinda, y'know, important? It goes varying degrees of well.

So, sitting down and really trying to learn what each item does, and how it'll affect your build using Mutex has actually been quite refreshing. It doesn't take too long, and because you can just open it in your browser, I've found myself messing around with it in short bursts whenever I get a second.

It turns out that there's also an interesting backstory behind Mutex's name. "In programming, a mutex is an object used to prevent multiple threads from accessing the same part of memory at the same time by locking and unlocking the mutex (mutual exclusion)," alayton explains. "If a thread locks a mutex, and mistakenly tries to lock it again before unlocking, the second lock will never succeed, the first lock will never be unlocked, and that's called a deadlock. (There's other ways for deadlocks to happen, but that's the easiest example.)" You learn something new every day.

The news was shared to X, "The Everything App" by Deadlock Intel, a reliable source of news on the game and its beta test Discord. Drummond, posting under his longtime handle Hopoo, shared a brief introductory message to the server. "I'll be around so no need to cram it all now," Drummond wrote. "Any fixes I do today most likely won't make it to today's build, just to set expectations."

Drummond and Paul Morse co-created the popular Risk of Rain series of roguelikes, with ownership of the series and stewardship of Risk of Rain 2 recently passing to the game's publisher, Gearbox, to mixed results. On September 3, Hopoo Games announced that most of the team had joined Valve, including Drummond and Morse, with the studio going dark and development halting on an unannounced game codenamed "Snail."

It's unknown at this point if Morse and the rest of Hopoo are also working on Deadlock, or if they're taking on other projects at the famously opaque developer. Court documents show that Valve consisted of 336 employees in 2021, with more than half of them (181) focused on active game development. Counter-Strike 2 and Deadlock are the most actively-supported of the studio's games these days, but you have to imagine the team behind 2020's single player Half-Life: Alyx is working on something else?—that is if it isn't already DOA, far from an impossibility given the studio's history.

As PCG staff writer Harvey Randall pointed out when Hopoo first went public with the news, it's hard not to see the parallels with Firewatch creator Campo Santo, which was hired on by Valve in 2018. Campo Santo's anticipated follow-up game, In the Valley of the Gods, looks to be on indefinite hold, while at least some of those developers wound up working on Half-Life: Alyx. Part of me mourns the loss of distinctive, successful independent studios like Hopoo or Campo Santo, the promise of more games from them overtaken by the same vague hope for more output from the infamous "when it's done (it will never be done)" -loving Valve we've had since 2007.

At the same time, Hopoo's demonstrated expertise with third person shooters and itemized progression from Risk of Rain are a perfect fit for Deadlock, similar to how Campo Santo's affinity for first person exploration and storytelling no doubt helped make Half-Life: Alyx into a great game. At the end of the day, if you got a job offer to work at Valve, wouldn't you take it?

Mirage is the newest hero Valve has added to Deadlock. He's a bodyguard for the Djinn ambassador Nashala Dion, who is currently in New York City on a diplomatic mission: Finding a safe home for their kind and, for some reason, the best candidate for a new sovereign land is Wyoming. I've never set foot in the US, so I can't speak on what Wyoming is like compared to the rest of the States, but it does seem like a random choice for a new utopia.

But other than having Wyoming in his sights, Mirage seems to be pretty useful on the battlefield. Tornado is his primary attack, transforming him into a whirlwind that can launch enemies into the air and deal damage. Mirage's other abilities are Fire Scarabs and Djiinn's Mark. One launches bugs that drain enemy life force, and the other is a passive ability that increases the multiplier on your chosen target. Finally, his ultimate lets him teleport to allies or enemies, giving him a speed boost for a short time after.

Others are also having just as much fun as I am learning the story behind Deadlock's most specific real estate agent, as well as other heroes: "I hope they keep it random," one player says. "It's so much fun to sift through the lore when you suddenly get blindsided by 'Is it cannibalism to eat werewolves?' My only hope for Deadlock's story is that it doesn't stay in lore purgatory like Overwatch when they can't have anything happen, so it's just constantly alluding to future and past events that will never get expanded upon."?

I'm not sure where Deadlock's story is going, but I'd like it to keep an easy-going attitude as it progresses. I'm having great fun discovering more weird tidbits as I explore the map, read heroes' lore, and browse the papers available on the newspaper stands.?

A recent Deadlock update, shared by Valve dev Yoshi, has given players a new way to combat cheaters: "When a user is detected as cheating during the game session, the opponents will be given a choice between banning the user immediately and ending the match or turning the cheater into a frog for the rest of the game and then banning them afterward," Yoshi says in a forum post.?

"The system is set to conservative detection levels as we work on a v2 anti cheat system that is more extensive. We will turn on the banning of users in a couple of days after the update is out. When a match is ended this way, the results will not count for other players."

If you're wondering what this looks like, here's a video of one player who got caught cheating, desperately trying to hop away from an enemy team that is just beating them to a pulp. With only 500 health, you probably won't last long as a frog who hops slowly and has no way of defending themselves.?

I think this is a fantastic way to punish players who bend the rules. I've come up against someone who was clearly aim-botting before in Deadlock, and while Valve has been quite strict with punishing those found guilty of cheating, it's still annoying to play against them for an entire match, knowing there's not a lot you can do about it until the game is over. So cursing cheaters and transforming them into frogs seems like a proportionate response if you ask me.?

But you also shouldn't worry if you find yourself accidentally fighting alongside a cheater. If the other team does vote to carry on the fight with your sixth team member as a frog, then the result of the match won't count. Otherwise, innocent players would be forced to carry on a losing game of 6v5 (plus an unhelpful frog). This way, everyone wins except for the cheater, just as it should be.?

While most players are certainly happy with this change, there are a few who aren't getting their hopes up. "Someone's going to find a way to turn this frog into that Baldur's Gate 3 terror and solo win the match," one player says. I wouldn't count this out from happening eventually, but I'd also hope that as work on a v2 anti-cheat system continues, Valve would find a way for it to track whether or not the frog had obtained further godlike powers through hacking. It would be a bit of a kill-joy move, but I'd rather stop a game than get beaten up by frog, destroyer of worlds.?

But that's a problem for another day. For the time being, I'm just happy that Valve has done something to address cheaters in Deadlock. Toward the end of August, Valve announced that it had a team of developers working on anti-cheat, as well as a review group in Discord dedicated to monitoring reports of cheaters, so it's great to see the result of all this hard work.?

Riot Games has unveiled the 2024 League of Legends World Championship Anthem, a new track from Linkin Park called Heavy is the Crown, with a brand new music video that debuted today on YouTube.

"The 2024 Worlds Music Video envisions renowned League of Legends pro player Lee 'Faker' Sang-hyeok as a newly crowned king as he battles a legion of aspiring rulers who arrive on his doorstep," Riot said. "Through the story of a warrior fighting to protect a kingdom under siege, the video honors Faker and T1’s victory at Worlds 2023 while embodying the powerful spirit of League players. It also celebrates the rich history of kingdoms and dynasties in London, where the Worlds Finals will take place on November 2, 2024."

That definitely seems to be what's going on here. The ritual of succession in League of Legends appears to be a little more active than the one I'm accustomed to as a loyal citizen of the British Empire: Rather than, y'know, "the kid gets the lid," in League it seems they just plunk the crown jewels on the throne and let whoever shows up throw hands for it—which despite great expenditures of effort amounts to very little until Faker shows up, pushing his way through massive double doors in the dramatic fashion established by Aragorn at Rohan.

Courtesy of Riot, here's the full list of pretenders in the video and the teams they represent:

• T1: Faker, Keria, Gumayusi, Zeus, Oner
• G2: Caps
• Flyquest: Massu
• Red Canids: Brance
• BLG: Bin
• GenG: Chovy

It's a lot of weight on Faker, but "heavy is the crown" isn't just the name of the song. It's also a bastardization of a famous line from William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2: "Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose to the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude; and in the calmest and most stillest night, with all appliances and means to boot, deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down! Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."

Personally I'm more inclined to ascribe to Mel Brooks' take on the matter—it's good to be the king—but there's no denying that sooner or later, someone coming for the king might not miss. The good news for Faker, who's widely recognized as the greatest esports player of all time with multiple championships to his name including the 2023 Worlds, is that the worst-case outcome—losing a tourney—really sucks, but at least it doesn't result in your head on a pike and your limbs scattered to the four corners of the realm.

As for the song itself, it doesn't strike me as Linkin Park's best. It's very much a Linkin Park song, and the reception to the track in the comments on YouTube seem generally positive, but to my ear it's formulaic and phoned-in, as though the band is going through the motions because that's what it gets paid to do. It's definitely no Pop/Stars, the 2018 K/DA track that briefly turned me into a K-Pop fan.?

Now that's a banger.

The League of Legends 2024 World Championship tournament kicks off tomorrow, September 25, and will conclude at the O2 Arena in London on November 2. You can follow along at lolesports.com.?

While the stock crosshair is a perfectly good workhorse of a graphic, its small size and subtle color won’t be a good fit for all players. Thankfully, Valve made it painless to customize the crosshair to your liking, and console commands allow you to go beyond what’s possible in the settings menu.

Best Deadlock crosshair

Personally, I like the stock crosshair, but I prefer to rein it in so it’s even more precise and change the color to bright pink so I never lose track of it in chaotic team fights. I increase the height of the pips (the little lines surrounding the center dot) and offset the increased noise by adjusting the width of each pip, as well as the gap size between the pip and dot, to be nearly as low as the normal settings allow. What I end up with is a near-perfect little plus symbol that's always clearly visible and doesn't jump around too much mid-fight.

It’ll look a little something like this:?

To use this exact crosshair, you can load up the console once in-game (default keybind is F7) and paste the following settings:

citadel_crosshair_color_r 255; citadel_crosshair_color_b 183; citadel_crosshair_color_g 0; citadel_crosshair_pip_border true; citadel_crosshair_pip_opacity 1; citadel_crosshair_pip_width 4; citadel_crosshair_pip_height 16; citadel_crosshair_pip_gap 0; citadel_crosshair_dot_opacity 0.7; citadel_crosshair_dot_outline_opacity 1

?How to customize your Deadlock crosshair?

If you’d like to fiddle around with the settings, it’s easy enough to go into Sandbox Mode from the Play menu, press the settings button near the bottom-left of the screen, and adjust the sliders on the first page labeled “reticle settings.” But if you’re something of a crosshair connoisseur, an iron sights sommelier, or, uh, a Counter-Strike player, you’ll get some additional customizability in the console menu.

This is especially relevant for pip width, height, and gap. These have caps in the settings menu, but you can circumvent these by typing a custom value into the console. You can set pip gap to a negative number for a borderless cross look, or set the pip height to 1,000 if you want that cross to be so big it’s like a beacon in the night sky for Jesus to take the wheel.

citadel_crosshair_color_r: This is the red saturation slider.

citadel_crosshair_color_b: This is the blue saturation slider.

citadel_crosshair_color_g: This is the green saturation slider.

citadel_crosshair_pip_border [true/false]: Determines whether pips have a black outline surrounding them.

citadel_crosshair_pip_opacity: Determines how translucent pips are.

citadel_crosshair_pip_width: Determines pip width.

citadel_crosshair_pip_height: Determines pip length.?

citadel_crosshair_pip_gap: Determines how distant pips are from the center dot.

citadel_crosshair_dot_opacity: Determines how translucent the center dot is.

citadel_crosshair_dot_outline_opacity: Determines how translucent the center dot’s black outline is.

Deadlock crosshair generator

If you want an easy look at the full gamut of options, there’s always the fan-made deadlockcrosshair.com, which allows you to view your crosshair while adjusting values and dial in exactly what you want. There’s also a small selection of premade crosshairs to try on and see what fits you best.

You can export any of these, as well as any you make yourself, by hitting the “copy config” button, which saves all the requisite console commands to your clipboard. Simply boot up Deadlock, paste the text into your console (again, the default keybind is F7), and it should be smooth sailing from there.

If you're curious about Valve's stance on the keybind stuff, Yoshi wrote: "Our plan is to restrict those in the near future, once we get enough of the legitimate uses people have added to the settings menu." That's not too surprising, given the company's attitude towards programs like Snap Tap in CS2.

It's also not surprising that people are asking about it, considering Deadlock's already getting aimbotters who, for some reason, want to get their power trips out of a MOBA playtest. Valve has a history with this sort of thing, alas—bots have been a plague in TF2 for years to varying degrees. Counter-Strike 2 has VAC live, though even a quick jaunt to the CS2 subreddit shows that, uh, there's probably still a problem.

But this isn't some new revelation: Valve's been working on this for a while. Behold, the power of Discord's search bar made manifest:

• August 11: Regarding "Anti Cheat questions, we are working on it atm and certainly consider it a very high priority in the long term".
• August 20: "We are adding a process soon on Discord to report cheaters," Yoshi adds, "While we work on our anti cheat."
• August 24: "We have a group of people working on anti cheat. In the short term while that system is developed we will be having a review group on Discord that helps look into reported cheater games." This was also double-confirmed in the announcements channel.

How long it'll take the system to be realised, though, and how effective it'll be, is another question entirely. Valve's been gun shy about making the move to kernel-level anti cheat software in the past—that is, software that has the maximum level of authority over your system. Kernel-level anti-cheat is controversial, invasive, and a potential security risk, though some developers argue it's required to keep pace with hack creators.

Instead, the company's bolstered its own huge banwaves with community policing: Player reports, low-priority queues, Counter-Strike and Dota 2's Overwatch system, and so on. VAC bans also help provide an extra anti-carrot to the 'stop cheating' stick by threatening players with closed doors on multiple games.

It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, though. Eliminating 100% of cheaters is completely implausible—but games do still have to cull the herd to manageable levels when possible, something Valve does not historically have the best track record on. I'll be interested to see if this fabled anti-cheat strikes a good balance when it arrives. At the very least, it feels good to be the golden child.

Players can also now lose access to certain capabilities in-game as punishments, such as matchmaking, voice and text chat, pausing, and even reporting other players for abuse.

It's a nice step forward, and an inevitable one, in what will probably be one of the highest-profile open development cycles since Valorant's late 2019 and early 2020 betas. They'll need that pretty quick, to be honest—they've already got cheaters messing around in there which is honestly pretty sad for the cheaters. It's not even a finished game.

Deadlock has certainly been the subject of much discussion here at PC Gamer, with Morgan Park letting us all know that even if it has guns it's probably not a shooter and Justin Wagner ignoring him completely in order to go and play more deadlock.

"Deadlock gives me the same feeling Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 did before they consumed my life," said Wagner.?

"Deadlock is an iteration on the MOBA, but it’s not an incremental one. While so many games have come and gone angling to “reinvent” the genre by shifting the camera angle or tweaking a few mechanics, this game is so stuffed with new ideas it’s difficult to appraise just how much depth it all lends," he continued.

Either way, everyone can agree on who the best gargoyle in Deadlock is.

As anyone who's been playing the beta of Deadlock (which is shaping up to be the next big thing by a lot of metrics) will tell you, the game's locked testing session times—typically 1 pm to 3 am Monday to Thursday, and 9 am to 3 am Friday to Sunday, usually accounting for your local timezone—were the bane of many looking to get some early morning matches in. I've been caught out a few times myself, taking an early lunch break only to be turned away at the door because I had the audacity to eat before 1 pm.

Well, no longer: "Matchmaking is now open 24/7 for all regions," read the patch notes. Funnily enough, the in-game server status window just reads: "Status:" with nothing to the right of it. What is the status of Deadlock? That's classified.

There's a few other things to be excited about. For starters, there's a new minimap—who cares, you might ask, but if you've played any MOBA for any amount of time, you'll know that you'll be staring at your minimap whenever you aren't shooting or fighting something.

This gives it a pretty backdrop, and is also supposed to highlight neutral camps (or creeps) with a glow around the buildings they're in. I wasn't able to see this in the bot match I hopped into, alas. Also, the orange lane is green now. The impact of this colour change on the metagame is tremendous, and we should see the fallout of it in the coming days.

There's also a low-priority queue, too. This'll be familiar to anyone coming over from Dota 2, but essentially, abandoning games or being rude will put you in a queue with other sinners, where you'll have to complete a few rancid games before you're allowed to play with the good kids again. "Regularly misreporting players will result in you losing the reporting function and may in some cases cause you to go into low priority as well."

The last major change is that your first "flex" slot, which allows you to plonk Weapon, Vitality, or Spirit items into it willy-nilly, will be unlocked after you've killed the second enemy Walker, not the first. This is actually pretty big, since it slows the power scaling of a team on the offensive—mind, having enough Souls banked to take advantage of a flex slot that early on is pretty rare, anyway.

As per usual with Deadlock, Valve is in its early iterating stages—which means patches are both frequent and often massive, too large to list here. If you want the full list of tuning tweaks and further details, check out Valve's official forum post. Alas, there's no sign of Slork yet.

With thousands of matches between League of Legends, Dota 2, Heroes of the Storm, and Smite, I was sure I was over this whole MOBA thing. If I have to kill one more lane creep, I thought, I might just lose my mind. When I saw Deadlock’s multicolored lanes and waves of creeps, I was worried it’d be banal—late to a party Valve itself helped start some 15 years ago. But I quickly realized Deadlock is not Dota, nor is it Overwatch or Valorant; it’s something completely novel which flips the MOBA on its head, not by stripping anything away, but by expanding on it and implementing a full decade of lessons learned.

My favorite example of this is last-hitting. Dota used to have the genre’s most interactive take on last-hitting because you can also deny enemies last hits by killing friendly creeps before they can. The problem is denying is not intuitive; new players struggle to last-hit in the first place, let alone last-hit their own wave to properly manage a lane. In Deadlock, last-hitting is two-fold: you need to kill the creep to get half its cash, and then shoot the soul orb that floats out of it to get the rest. But if your opponent shoots the soul orb first, they get it.

Immediately, laning is a part of the video game I signed up for rather than a dull prologue. Trades with your opponent are the emphasis; from the second you both arrive in lane, it’s a head-to-head game of Duck Hunt where the quicker draw always wins. And while this mechanic has some fine print, it all adds richness. Because income is shared with nearby teammates, support characters can join in on the gold farming other games reserve for item-dependent carries. Because melee last-hits cinch a full payout without releasing a soul orb, short-range tanks like Abrams aren’t compromised against characters with long-range harassment.

Deadlock is an iteration on the MOBA, but it’s not an incremental one. While so many games have come and gone angling to “reinvent” the genre by shifting the camera angle or tweaking a few mechanics, this game is so stuffed with new ideas it’s difficult to appraise just how much depth it all lends.

Have ult, will travel

Take the map, for instance. PC Gamer staff writer Harvey Randall had plenty of astute things to say about Deadlock's lanes, and that geometric genius extends to the whole Cursed Apple. Other MOBAs have a jungle, the space between lanes where players farm gold by killing hordes of NPCs. Deadlock has a concrete jungle of its own, but that over-the-shoulder camera allows for some devious design.

For one, the map is highly vertical, with skyscrapers and dangling ropes allowing for dastardly escapes across the Z-axis. Building interiors are filled with dead ends, stairways, tight corridors, and distracting apparitions; running away has never been more fun in a MOBA than right here, and it’s owed in part to the excellent map.

It’s also owed to Deadlock's advanced movement, which is more reminiscent of modern shooters than the RTS mods making up most of 顿别补诲濒辞肠办’蝉 DNA. There’s a universal melee bind as well as parry mechanics and a stamina gauge. Air dashes, extended rolls, dodges in each direction; it all adds a rock-paper-scissors tactical richness to every encounter. If I want to engage I might roll in and use an ability, risking a melee counter-attack; but if I react in time, I can parry and practically guarantee a kill, or opt for a more cautious dodge roll and save my cooldowns.

Ganks for the memories

This might all sound like it invalidates gunplay, and it kind of does, relatively speaking. For instance, two of my favorite heroes, the duo Mo & Krill, have a piddly gun that’s only there to poke and secure kills. The real meat of the character is in their ability to tunnel beneath enemies and knock them all into the air, disarming them and locking one down with an extended stun. Headshots and long bombs do play a role, but they’re always second to securing the economic lead, using powerful abilities to win teamfights, and effective rotation around the map.

Each lane comes equipped with zip lines, Deadlock's method of fast travel between spawn and lanes. Other MOBAs offer limited teleportation, a speed boost when leaving base, out-of-combat mounts and so on. But 顿别补诲濒辞肠办’蝉 solution is to let players zip around at lightning speed from spawn to each of its lanes—so long as they don’t get shot off of it and stunned for an easy kill.

Each team controls the length of their zip lines by pushing toward objectives in each lane, so rather than trivialize all the fighting happening below, that precious mobility becomes yet another resource to fight over. The more lane you control, the faster you can get there.

There’s a ton to be excited about with Deadlock, but most prominently, I am excited that this MOBA pushes the genre into genuinely new space. It might look from the outset like just another hero shooter or even just another MOBA, but Deadlock takes a format that seemed to crystallize and stagnate with Dota 2’s success and upheaves the status quo. It’s not “like League of Legends, but with guns” or “if Dota had a different camera angle;” it’s a properly new thing altogether, and I feel like I’ve barely charted the depth on offer here.

So if you're living and breathing Deadlock and need a quick page to reference a hero's name and abilities, we've got you covered. Below are the details of all 21 Deadlock heroes as they currently stand, as well as the names and early looks at 13 unreleased heroes that are currently only accessible by console command. The entire hero roster is still very much subject to change—Valve is already in the process of redesigning the look of Yamato, for instance—so check back regularly for updates.

Deadlock heroes

Abrams

"Charges into close combat"

1. Siphon Health: Drain health from enemies in front of you while they are in the radius.
2. Shoulder Charge: Charge forward, colliding with enemies and dragging them along. Hitting a wall will stun enemies caught by Abrams. Speed increased after colliding with enemy heroes.
3. Infernal Resilience (Passive): Regenerate a portion of incoming damage over time.
4. Seismic Impact (Ultimate): Leap high into the air and choose a ground location to crash into. When you hit the ground, all enemies in the radius are damaged and stunned.

Bebop

"Hooks enemies for a knockout combo"

1. Exploding Uppercut: Deal light melee damage to nearby units and send them flying back, causing area damage where they land. Does not damage allies.
2. Sticky Bomb: Attach a sticky bomb to a nearby target that deals explosive damage after a short fuse time. Gain +2.5% bomb damage for every enemy hero hit.
3. Hook: Launch out a hook that grabs and reels in the first enemy hero it hits, dealing damage. Target will be placed where you are facing. Cast using [M3 by default] to target friendly heroes.
4. Hyper Beam (Ultimate): Charge up your laser to unleash a powerful torrent of energy that deals damage and slows enemies' movement and dashes.You have slow movement and turn rate for the duration. If activated in the air, you will hover while unleashing the beam.

Dynamo

"Locks down the enemy team"

1. Kinetic Pulse: Release an energy pulse that knocks enemies up into the air.
2. Quantum Entanglement: Dynamo briefly disappears into the void and then reappears a short distance away. On reappearing, your weapon is reloaded and has a fire rate bonus for the next clip (Max 8s). Can be cast with [M3 by default] to also bring nearby allies and give them half fire rate bonus.
3. Rejuvenating Aurora: While channeling, restore health over time to you and any allies nearby.
4. Singularity (Ultimate): Create a singularity in your hands that pulls in nearby enemies and damages them. Once it's finished, enemies get knocked into the air.

Grey Talon

"Delivers long range skill-shots"

1. Charged Shot: Charge up a powerful shot that pierces through enemies. Hold [1] or left-click to hold the shot.
2. Rain of Arrows: Launches you high in the air, allowing you to glide slowly. While airborne, you gain weapon damage and multishot on your weapon. Press [Space by default] to cancel the glide.
3. Immobilizing Trap: Throw out a trap that begins to arm itself. Once armed, the trap will trigger when an enemy enters its radius, immobilizing and slowing them.
4. Guided Owl (Ultimate): After 1.5s cast time, launch a spirit owl that you control and which explodes on impact, damaging and stunning enemies. Hold left-click to accelerate the owl. Press [Space by default] to release control. Gain permanent Spirit Power for each enemy hero killed with Guided Owl.

Haze

"Sneaks in and sprays bullets"

1. Sleep Dagger: Throw a dagger that damages and sleeps the target. Sleeping targets wake up shortly after being damaged. Throwing a Dagger does not break your invisibility. Sleep Dagger does not interrupt enemies' channeling abilities.
2. Smoke Bomb: Fade out of sight, becoming invisible and gaining sprint speed. Attacking removes invisibility. Close enemies can see through your invisibility.
3. Fixation (Passive): Shooting a target increases your bullet damage on that target. Gain one stack per bullet hit, two if the hit is a headshot.
4. Bullet Dance (Ultimate): Enter a flurry, firing your weapon at nearby enemies with perfect accuracy. During the flurry, Haze gains a fire rate bonus and will evade some of the bullets shot at her.

Infernus

"Lights up enemies and watches them burn"

1. Catalyst: Spew napalm that slows enemy movement and amplifies the damage Infernus does to them.
2. Flame Dash: Move forward at high speed and leave a flame trail that burns enemies. Infernus gains 30% slow resistance for the duration. Hold left-click to dash faster.
3. Afterburn (Passive): Your bullets build up to apply a burning effect on enemies. Infernus' bullets and abilities will refresh the duration.
4. Concussive Combustion (Ultimate): Turns you into a living bomb that explodes after a short delay, stunning all enemies in its radius.

Ivy

"Sets up a power duo with a lucky ally"

1. Kudzu Bomb: Summon a patch of choking vines that damages and slows enemies in its radius.
2. Watchers' Covenant: Gain bonuses and automatically connect with a nearby ally to share them. Healing is replicated among all those connected. Connection requires line of sight. Press [2 by default] to lock on to a target.
3. Stone Form: Turn yourself into impervious stone and smash into the ground, stunning and damaging enemies nearby. Heals you for a percentage of your max health. You have some air control before falling.
4. Air Drop (Ultimate): Take flight with an alley or a bomb. Drop your alley or bomb to cause a large explosion that causes movement slow. Ivy and ally gain a bullet shield when flying ends. While lifted, your ally gains bullet resist but cannot attack and deals -50% damage. Air Drop has faster cast time when targeting an ally. Left-click to accelerate flying speed. Right-click to drop ally/bomb.

Kelvin

"Freezes enemies in their tracks"

1. Frost Grenade: Throw a grenade that explodes in a cloud of freezing ice, damaging and slowing enemies.
2. Ice Path: Kelvin creates a floating trail of ice and snow that gives movement bonuses to him and his allies. Kelvin gains 60% slow resistance for the duration. Enemies can also walk on the floating trail. Press [Left Shift] / [Left CTRL] to travel up or down while in Ice Path.
3. Arctic Beam: Shoot freezing cold energy out in front of you, damaging targets and building up movement and fire rate slow against them the longer you sustain the beam on them. You have reduced movement speed while using Arctic Beam. The beam may also claim souls.
4. Frozen Shelter: Kelvin freezes the air around him, creating an impenetrable dome around himself. Whyiel in the dome, allies rapidly regenerate health and enemies are slowed.

Lady Geist

"Sacrifices health then drains it back"

1. Essence Bomb: Sacrifice some of your health to launch a bomb that deals damage after a brief arm time. Self damage type is Spirit and can be mitigated.
2. Life Drain: Create a tether that drains enemy health over time and heals you. Target must be in light of sight and within max range to drain. You can shoot and use other abilities during the drain, but your movement speed is reduced by half. Press [2] to cancel.
3. Malice: Sacrifice some of your health to launch blood shards that apply a stack of Malice. Each stack slows the victim and increases the damage they take from you. The Slow effect decreases over time.
4. Soul Exchange (Ultimate): Swaps health levels with an enemy target. There is a minimum health percentage that enemies can be brought down to and a minimum amount of health received based on victim's current health.

Lash

"Dives down to stomp on his foes"

1. Ground Strike: Stomp the ground beneath you, damaging enemies in front of you. If you perform Ground Strike while airborne, you quickly dive towards the ground. Damage grows slower after 25m.
2. Grapple: Pull yourself through the air toward a target. Using Grapple also resets your limit of air jumps and dashes.
3. Flog: Strike enemies with your whip, stealing life from them.
4. Death Slam (Ultimate): Focus on enemies to connect whips to them. After channeling, connected enemies are lifted and stunned then slammed into the ground. Your victims and any enemies in the landing zone will be damaged and slowed. Press Left-Click to throw connected enemies early. Enemies that are not in line of sight or go out of range during the latch time will not be grabbed.

McGinnis

"Controls the battle with combat turrets"

1. Mini Turret: Deploy a Mini Turret that automatically shoots enemies. The turret expires after a limited lifetime. Turrets gain 30% of McGinnis' max health and have 60% Spirit Reist. They deal reduced damage to troopers and objectives.
2. Medicinal Specter: Deploy a spirit that heals nearby allies.
3. Spectral Wall: Creates a wall that divides the terrain in half. On creation, the wall deals damage and applies slow to enemies nearby. After casting, press Left-Click or [3] to erupt the wall early.
4. Heavy Barrage (Ultimate): Unleashes a volley of rockets that home in on a targeted location.

Mo & Krill

"Burrows underneath his enemies"

1. Scorn: Deal damage to nearby enemies and heal yourself based on the damage done. Heal is stronger against enemy heroes.
2. Burrow: Burrow underground, moving faster, and gaining spirit and bullet armor. Damage from enemy heroes will reduce the speed bonus. When you jump out, knock enemies into the air and perform a spin attack that damages and slows. Cooldown starts when Burrow ends.
3. Sand Blast: Spray sand that disarms enemies in front of you and deals damage.
4. Combo (Ultimate): Hold the target in place, stunning them and dealing damage during the channel. If they die during Combo, you permanently gain max health.

Paradox

"Manipulates Space and Time"

1. Pulse Grenade: Throw a grenade that begins pulsing when it lands. Each pulse applies damage, movement slow, and stacking damage amplification for paradox against the victim.
2. Time Wall: Create a time warping wall that stops time for all enemy projectiles and bullets that touch it. Enemies that touch the wall will take damage as a percentage of their max health and be briefly slowed.
3. Kinetic Carbine: Start charging your weapon and gain increased movement speed once it's fully charged. Your next shot will release the energy, dealing spirit damage and applying a time stop to the enemy hit. The damage dealt is an amplification of your current weapon damage. You can slow time on yourself by pressing Left-Click while an empowered shot is available.
4. Paradoxical Swap (Ultimate): Fire a projectile that swaps your position with the target enemy hero. While the effect occurs, you gain spirit lifesteal and the enemy takes damage over time.

Pocket

"Infiltrates and disrupts the backline"

1. Barrage: Channel to start launching projectiles that deal damage and apply movement slow around their impact point. Each projectile landed on a hero grants you a stacking buff that amplifies all of your damage. If you cast it while in the air, you'll float and maintain any horizontal momentum you started with.
2. Flying Cloak: Launch a sentient cloak that travels forward and damages enemies. You can press [2] to teleport to its location.
3. Enchanter's Satchel: Escape into your suitcase. When the duration ends, deal damage to nearby enemies. Duration can be ended early by performing any action.
4. Affliction (Ultimate): Apply damage over time to all enemies nearby. Affliction's damage is non-lethal and does not apply item procs.

Seven

"Electrocutes crowds of enemies"

1. Lightning Ball: Shoot a ball of lightning that travels in a straight line. Does damage to all targets in its radius. Slows down when damaging enemies and stops if it hits the world.
2. Static Charge: Apply a charge to a target enemy hero. After a short duration, the static charge stuns and damages enemies within the radius.
3. Power Surge: Power up your weapon with a shock effect, making your bullets proc shock damage on your target. This shock damage bounces to enemies near your target. Occurs once per burst shot.
4. Storm Cloud (Ultimate): Channel an expanding storm cloud around you that damages all enemies within its radius. Enemies do not take damage when they are out of line-of-sight. You have increased Bullet Resist during the channel.

Shiv

"Bleeds out foes, then goes in for the kill"

1. Serrated Knives: Throw a knife that damages and bleeds an enemy. Each additional hit adds a stack and refreshes the bleed duration, causing the bleed to increase per stack.
2. Slice and Dice: Perform a dash forward, damaging enemies along the path. Ultimate Unlock: While rage is full an echo of Shiv retraces the dash path after a short delay, damaging enemies again.
3. Bloodletting: Take only a portion of incoming damage immediately and defer the rest to be taken over time. Activate to clear a portion of the deferred damage.
4. Killing Blow: Activate to leap towards an enemy hero and instantly kill them if their health is below the kill threshold, otherwise deal 200 damage to them. Passive: Damaging enemies fills you with rage. While at full rage, Shiv gains increased damage and special properties on his other abilities.

Vindicta

"Snipes the unsuspecting"

1. Stake: Throw a stake that tethers enemies to the location where the stake lands. Enemy movement is restricted to the length of the tether.
2. Flight: Leap into the air and fly. WHile in flight your weapon deals bonus spirit damage.
3. Crow Familiar: Your crow familiar deals impact damage and applies a bleed that deals damage based on the target's current health.
4. Assassinate (Ultimate): Use your scoped rifle to fire a powerful shot over long distances. Deal only partial damage until fully charged after 1s of being scoped. Does bonus damage to enemies with less than 50% health remaining. Landing a killing blow on a player with Assassinate grants you bonus souls.

Viscous

"Rolls around deflecting bullets"

1. Splatter: Throw a ball of goo that deals damage and leaves puddles of goo behind that apply movement slow to enemies in the radius.
2. The Cube: Encase the target in a cube of restorative goo that purges debuffs, protects from damage, and increases health regen. Target is unable to take any new actions while cubed. Can be used on self. Press [Space by default] to escape early.
3. Puddle Punch: Materialize a fist in the world that punches units in the area and sends them flying. Enemies will be dealt damage, have their dash distance reduced for a brief moment, and have their movement slowed. This is considered a Light Melee attack.
4. Goo Ball (Ultimate): Morph into a large goo ball that deals damage and stuns enemies on impact. The gall grants large amounts of Bullet and Spirit resist, bounces off walls and can double jump.

Warden

"Weakens his enemies and chases them down"

1. Alchemical Flask: Throw a flask that damages, slows, and reduces the weapon damage and stamina of enemies it hits.
2. Willpower: Gain a spirit shield and bonus movement speed.
3. Binding Word: Curse an enemy hero. If they don't move away from their initial position with the escape time, they will be damaged and immobilized.
4. Last Stand (Ultimate): After charging for 2.2s, release pulses that damage enemies and heal you based on the damage done.

Wraith

"Melts isolated targets"

1. Card Trick: Deal weapon damage to summon cards. Activate to throw a card that flies towards the enemy or point under your crosshair.
2. Project Mind: Teleport to a targeted location.
3. Full Auto: Temporarily boosts your fire rate. Nearby allies receive half the fire rate bonus.
4. Telekinesis (Ultimate): Lift an enemy hero into the air, stunning them for a short time. When the lift ends, the target receives Telekinesis damage.

Yamato

"Delivers charged attacks with finesse"

1. Power Slash: channel to increase damage over 1.4 seconds, then release a fully-charged sword strike. Press [1] or Left-Click to trigger the strike early, dealing partial damage.
2. Flying Strike: Throw a grappling hook to reel yourself towards an enemy, damaging and slowing the target when you arrive.
3. Crimson Slash: Slash enemies in front of you, damaging them and slowing their fire rate. If any enemy heroes are hit, you heal.
4. Shadow Transformation (Ultimate): Become infused with Yamato's shadow soul. After an initial invincible transformation, your abilities are refreshed and are 60% faster, your weapon has infinite ammo, and you gain damage resist and immunity to negative status effects. You are unable to die in this mode.

Unreleased Deadlock Heroes

Valve is rolling out new Deadlock heroes at a regular pace, but it has also invited testers to access the loads of unfinished heroes in the hopper and give them a try, too. Here is every unfinished Deadlock hero found so far, with abilities listed for those that currently have them and lots of clearly work-in-progress character models.

If you want to spawn in these heroes yourself, access the console by pressing F7 and use the command selecthero hero_[name].

Calico

1. Perched Predator: Send a Spirit Cat forward that grab's targets in its way. Grabbing a hero will cause an explosion soon after. Press [1] to manually create the explosion.
2. Siamese Strike: Leap at a target. Targeting an enemy will cause damage and slow on nearby enemies. Targeting an alley will have reduced cooldown and recharge times.
3. Deadly Decor: Spawn a Statue that life steals from a nearby enemy, giving health to itself and Calico. Statues are activated only when Calico is nearby.
4. "Queen of Shadows (Ultimate)"

Astro

1. Powder Keg: Place a barrel that explodes when shot, or on landing after launched via melee attack or bounce pad. Has a minimum arm time before it can explode.
2. Bounce Pad: Drop a bounce pad in the world that sends you and other heroes flying. You will stomp down on landing, dealing damage to any nearby enemies.
3. Hat Trick: Throws out her hate to strike enemies, slowing and revealing them through walls.
4. Spirit Lasso (Ultimate): Grab an enemy with your lasso and drag them along behind you. The enemy is stunned and Astro is slowed slightly during the lasso. Lasso duration is paused for 2s during the first usage of a bounce pad.

Mirage

1. Tornado: Send out a tornado that damages enemies and lifts them up in the air.
2. Fire Beetles: Start launching fire beetles. Each beetle can be launched separately, applying a lifesteal over time to enemies they hit. Once the launch window ends, this ability goes on cooldown.
3. Whirling Dervish: Become enveloped in a whirlwind, gaining bullet evasion and bonus movement speed.
4. Djinn's Reach (Ultimate): Charge up and then launch a projectile that strikes the first enemy hero it hits, tethering it to up to two other enemy heroes nearby. Tethered heroes have their movement constrained to each other, have reduced bullet resistance, and suffer a portion of the damage any of the other tethered heroes receive. Hold [4] or Left-Click to hold the shot.

Wrecker

1. Wrecking Ball: Create a large ball of scrap that can be thrown, damaging and stunning anything it hits. The ball takes time to create and you move slower while carrying it.
2. Consume: Stuns an enemy trooper or NPC, damaging them while held. A successful kill provides a fire rate bonus, and restores a Bio Blast charge. This bonus stacks independently.
3. Bio Blast: Shoots out a blast of consumed remains, damaging and slowing enemies. Multiple hits increase the slow.
4. Astral Walk (Ultimate): Launch a flying shadow copy of yourself that you control, teleporting your original body to wherever it lands. The teleport explosion slows enemies and deals damage based on how long you were flying.

Bomber

• "Charged Bomb"

Cadence

1. "Anthem"
2. "Silence Contraptions"
3. "Lullaby"
4. "Crescendo"

Gunslinger

1. "Rapid Fire"
2. "Rocket Launcher"
3. "Tenacity"
4. "Sleep Bomb"

Kali

1. "Occilioblade"
2. "Pack Hunter"
3. "Dust Storm"
4. "Trapper's Delight"

Rutger

1. "Rocket Launcher"
2. "Force Field"
3. "Cheat Death"
4. "Pulse"

Slork

1. "Riptide"
2. "Chomp"
3. "Deep's Embrace"
4. "Ambush Predator"

Thumper

1. "Shatter Cannon"
2. "Spike Strip"
3. "Badger Drone"
4. "Vortex"

Tokamak

1. "Hot Shot"
2. "Dying Star"
3. "Blinding Radiance"
4. "Pulse Cannon"

Yakuza

1. "Shakedown"
2. "Hired Muscle"
3. "Protection Racket"
4. "Setting Sun"

At the time of writing, the game has a 24 hour peak of over 130,000 even in an invite-only test build—which is none too shabby, putting it over fully-released contemporaries like Helldivers 2. In other words, it's the new hotness. Which made it all the more ripe for some agent of chaos to waltz into the game's Discord server and cause anarchy earlier today.

Longest 2 minutes of my life from r/DeadlockTheGame

The message, posted by the server's Carl bot (affectionately renamed Bebop, after the game's terrifying version of Dota 2's Pudge—a robot that can hook enemies, slap a bomb on them, then knock them into next week) was dismissed a couple of minutes later by server mod Yoshi: "Some bot exploit was used to post that," they explained.

The rogue hacker, searching their presumably immeasurable mind palace for a retort that would further scupper Deadlock's reputation and send the entire Discord into disrepair, reached into their 296-step plan to sink Valve's newborn project and, in a masterstroke, replied: "(he's lying)". A bold move.

Obviously, Deadlock's not going anywhere. The bot in question, Carl, is widely used in a lot of Discord servers—and while it's a versatile little buddy, its customizability can also lead to moments like these. For instance, if you've got your permissions set wrong, any Joe Shmuck could use the !echo command to make the bot output a message to a specific channel. It's not clear which devious means of deception were used, but I can see plenty of oopsies waiting to happen just shifting through its documentation page alone.

Anyway—while the post itself was deleted, thanks to the month name in the Reddit embed above I was able to determine that the date of the incident was 1:58 am BST (Poland is one hour ahead of us Brits). Scrolling up to the exact moment the server exploded took a while, with dozens of Discord messages flooding every minute of the archives. Here's a few snippets from the #deadlock-chat channel in the immediate aftermath:

This has, naturally, also been fertile ground for the other mischief-makers to sow further chaos via the medium of shitposting. Here's a few of my favourites, which I picked up simply by typing "Shutdown" in Discord's chat search function:

• "I mean Deadlock blatantly infringes on multiple IPs, of course Sony is shutting them down. I have an Insider friend that says Nintendo and Microsoft will be joining Sony in a lawsuit."
• "Gabe Newell asked Yoshi why his game wasn't generating at least $1m USD in net profits per month by now then shut it down. All dev resources are now being diverted to Ricochet 2."
• "BRO IMAGINE GETTING ACCESS TO THAT AND USING IT TO POST SOME GENERIC 'WE ARE SHUTTING DOWN' MESSAGE. BIGGEST FUMBLE OF ALL TIME. YOU COULD HAVE TALKED ABOUT LICKING BALLS."
• "Deadlock is shutting down to contain the spread of Vindicta feet fans."

"Guess bebop needs nerfs next patch," Yoshi would later joke, about an hour afterwards, in between further nonsense gifs of fan favourite Ivy busting it down, gargoyle style. Whoever this roustabout is, they've successfully achieved absolute pandemonium.

A video has appeared over the last few days showing the first cheaters that I and many other players have seen in Deadlock. There are two cheaters seen here who may be playing together as they are in the same lane, and the odds of finding two cheaters in Deadlock playing side by side is too much of a coincidence.?

One is playing as Infernus, and the other is Vindicta, and from the get-go, it's clear that they are aim-botting. Infernus initially makes some pretty impressive shots against the candle minions (creeps). But when they finally pick a fight with the rival heroes, specifically Seven, you can see the crosshair snapping onto both of them. Then, when the camera turns to Vindicta, you can see the player not only snap onto the enemy team but somehow curve their bullets so they can hit enemies hiding behind walls.?

"So you were saying just right off the back, [Infernus] is going like all out," the player who recorded this video says to his friend. "Oh my gosh! He started shooting through the wall first thing. Oh my gosh. And yet, somehow, we were still winning this… Deadlock has cheaters already—that's cool. Very blatant ones too, very blatant, do not care at all."

Taking a look at deadlock cheaters from r/Steam

You may have to shoot things in Deadlock, but that doesn't make it a strictly FPS game. Just because you can lock-on to players to kill them easily doesn't mean you know how to level up your abilities, pick the best items, or even have a good strategy for playing in a MOBA (although it will help a lot). The Vindicta seen in the video above hadn't even gotten around to upgrading their ultimate yet, as they were clearly too preoccupied.

Some players are already placing a lot of onus on their ranking within Deadlock, so it makes sense that people would turn to cheating. While there are no official ways to work out your MMR, as Valve is still working on improving this, there are third-party websites that have been figuring this out for players. Although the biggest website has just been restricted by Valve so it's currently not a lot of help.

But even so, cheating in a game that is still an alpha is sad: "What a sad existence must one have to cheat in a public alpha test?" one player says. "There aren't even any stakes right now, no leaderboards, no ranks, etc." Others have tried to stress how important it is to report cheaters as, hopefully, it'll end in them getting hardware banned, and while you can circumvent this, it'll hopefully work as a disincentive.?

Other players, those who have been a part of the TF2 or CS2 community for some time, have taken one look at these new cheaters in Deadlock and started forewarning others about the tragedies that befell both communities once cheaters got out of control: "Just like Counter Strike, they will plague every match for eternity, and Valve will do nothing." Calm down Nostradamus.?