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Deadlock matchmaking is so broken, even Valve devs are getting put in the wrong lobby: "Can you imagine playing a game and having no one to blame except yourself?"
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Valve's next shooter Deadlock is only in its very limited playtesting phase, to be fair, but, man, is its matchmaking broken. Not even the developers that helped create it are free from its fury.
In the official Deadlock Discord server, accessible only through the game itself, a player complains to Valve developer Yoshi (via Reddit screenshots), "The matchmaking is still messed up, im ascendant 3 and i got put into an oracle lobby." Yoshi responds, "same here." So, that's not good.
Ascendant is the second-highest-ranked tier in Deadlock, while Oracle falls around the upper-middle. Many players have noticed the MOBA keeps placing them in totally incompatible lobbies, either because they're immensely difficult or way too easy.
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"Please god I'll even take a full rank reset by this point," says one desperate player on Reddit. "I'm in Oracle 4 and I don't belong. I'm not a good player and should be down in like ritualist. And if I want to get to a more appropriate rank I have to basically throw games for my team to get there. Wasting tens of hours of matches."
Another Deadlock player on Reddit writes, "I'm an Asia player and yesterday, I was placed in a Chicago server. I thought getting new players in my team was bad, but damn."
This is no way for anyone to live. But if even Yoshi is getting thrown in the wrong pot, then you may need to get used to it. Valve has not made any recent public statement regarding the state of Deadlock matchmaking, but in 2024, Valve engineer Fletcher Dunn enthused about using ChatGPT to recommend a new Deadlock matchmaking algorithm. Then, he put it in the game.
"Can you imagine playing a game and having no one to blame except yourself? Couldn't be me," comments another player on Reddit. You could blame yourself, I suppose, or the robots.
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Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.
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