Deadlock now lets you avoid certain heroes when queuing for a game, but you can't avoid the newest ones

The Hidden King stood amid flames — (Image credit: Valve)

There's no greater pain in a MOBA than seeing your favorite hero swept into the swirling void of unplayability by a hero ban, but it’s a necessary evil, at least for buttoned-up ranked play. Bans make picking and counterpicking more interesting and keep imbalanced characters off the field while players wait for a balance patch—and to my delight, Deadlock has finally got them. Well, sort of.

What it's actually added is a “prefer to avoid” toggle you can assign to one hero from the game's roster when queuing for both standard play (which is always ranked) and Street Brawl, the new casual mode analogous to League of Legends's ARAM or Valorant's Spike Rush. You also can't avoid new heroes, which currently just applies to the six characters from Old Gods, New Blood.

The patch notes, which you can find on Deadlock’s feedback forum, call this a hero banning system, but there are a few reasons for both why this is different and why it might be necessary for a game in pre-alpha.

Most ranked modes in MOBAs have a draft phase—a pre-game lobby where both teams take turns selecting heroes for their team and banning them so that no one can play them in that match. In League of Legends, for instance, each player locks in a ban before anyone picks a hero (without seeing what the other team has banned) for a maximum of 10 unique bans.

Deadlock's hero banning is different because there's no chance to deliberate with your team beforehand; you pick the heroes you'd like to play, who you'd like to avoid, and you're dumped into a match with a bunch of strangers who did the same. While it bypasses the strategic, collaborative element a full draft introduces, it satisfies the same urge to avoid a particularly grating flavor-of-the-month build or practice a new hero without running into their hard counters.

It's probably too early for Deadlock to get an actual draft, anyway. There are only 34 playable heroes at the time I'm writing this and, assuming each player in a 6v6 game got a ban, a third of the roster would stand to be excluded every single match. Deadlock could implement a system where fewer bans are decided on by a team captain, as some MOBAs do, but if this toggle lets me play against Bebop less often, then I'm perfectly satisfied.

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Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica. Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...

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