Deadlock has picked up some vital tools for policing bad player behavior

Valve's in-development moba Deadlock picked up a couple new non-game features in an update this week, all of which are intended to make the experience of play among a larger population much better. The major first update is a low priority queue, which will place players in a secondary queue that's less likely to match. Players can be placed in low priority by abandoning games or for bad behavior, and will have to complete a certain number of full games in order to return to normal matchmaking.

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.

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Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.