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Valve has just rolled out one of the most important Deadlock fixes yet. Since the Half-Life, Portal, and TF2 maker’s MOBA went public, games have been anything but balanced. Players of an incredibly high skill level were constantly being paired with people playing for the first time, creating uneven matches for everyone. Because of this, the key complaint I’ve been reading for months is that games are either far too easy or way too hard. Now though, one simple matchmaking change should isolate Deadlock’s bad matchups.
The full Deadlock release date is likely still a way off yet, but that doesn’t mean the MOBA isn’t playable. Valve has been releasing plenty of patches with new heroes and mechanics for a while now, but the matchmaking improvements are by far the biggest Deadlock changes.
That’s why it’s delightful to read that those team compositions of wildly different skill levels should (mostly) be a thing of the past. Valve is bringing parties with large skill gaps into more of their own games, in an effort to keep the problem as contained as possible.
“We are making a change to how we matchmake with parties,” Valve developer ‘Yoshi’ writes on Discord. “A large volume of the worst quality matches we get reports on have parties with a very large skill gap in them (sometimes with things like players at 5th percentile and 95th percentile partied together). Starting today, we will make parties with a wide skill range only match with other similar parties (it’ll still use normal matchmaking skill rules otherwise).
“This helps isolate the bad matches to a smaller segment, and we expect it will have a minor negative impact on the matches for those in large gap parties, but will have a substantial positive impact on all other cases by concentrating the large gaps together rather than spreading them on all the matches. There will be a UI indicator if your party is in this state, so users can know what to expect before they get into a match.”
Valve promised some Deadlock MMR changes over a month ago, and this adjustment is part of that. Yoshi previously wrote that the hero-based MMR system “doesn’t work very well,” and that this was causing the wide skill gap problem between teammates. Valve then started asking players for Deadlock matchmaking feedback, in the hope that root causes could be identified. The developer was taking on match IDs and evaluating exactly what went wrong. It appears to have paid off.
With the game still being in an early state, there are plenty of adjustments that keep rolling in. In fact, Valve just took aim at the Deadlock queue times, by changing the matchmaking schedule. “There will now be a wider continuous, but more concentrated, set of hours that it is enabled in,” Yoshi writes.
If you’re still actively playing the early version of Valve’s new MOBA, we’ve got all the custom Deadlock crosshair info you need alongside a breakdown of every one of the Deadlock characters as well.
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