Valve is punishing Deadlock cheaters in the best way possible, turning them into helpless frogs

Deadlock has had a few issues with cheaters since it entered its closed beta test, as some players found ways to give them an unfair advantage over their opponents. But now we have a way to fight back—frogs. No, I didn't misspell 'frags'.

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.