Yes, I should’ve expected this. As usual, a free-to-play competitive MOBA is full of toxic players. That’s not a surprise to anyone, but this is extra grim, because there’s absolutely nothing to play for in Deadlock. The game’s art isn’t even finished. There’s no ranked mode, no rewards, nothing. It’s been playable for about two weeks in total and there are already players who think they’re the next Faker. It’d actually be pretty funny if♕ it wasn’t so sad.
Well, some of it is kinda funny. There’s a function where each player, yes, any 12 of them, can pause the game for everyone for 20 seconds. In one of my games yesterday, the g🐓ame was paused 11 times and the chat was filled with utter nonsense. Every time the game was paused the same player said “brb toilet break.” In moments like this, I start to think that maybe toxic players are more self-aware than I give them credit for. It’s a conscious choice to be annoying, not a blind, rage-fuelled reaction. But why? Why is their go-to choice saying unpleasant things about my innocent, uninvolved mother?
Dea𒆙dlock Was Originally A Half-Life Spin-Off, Leaker Claims
Supposedly, it would've seen us fighting in the Sev꧅en Hour War.
It’s one of the reasons the genre has never c🦩ompletely overtaken my life. When League of Legends and DOTA are good they’re really good, but the moment someone slips up in the game it’s like your teammates are infected with a kind of toxic brainrot. I watched a poor Abrams player get abused in our team chat, until they sheepishly replied “This is my first game.” If the barrier to entry is this toxic already, what will Deadlock look like in a year? Probably League of Legends.
I still play League every now and then. There’s a reason it’s been a popular game for over a decade — it’s pretty good. But these days I mute my chat and pings, and sit and play the game as if I were playing with robots. I hate listening to the toxic dribble of other players, in team chat, in all chat. Anywhere you can trash talk each other, it's likely MOBA players are doing it.
Deadlock has an incredibly high skill ceiling, so high that I don’t think any player has even come close to it, not even the swaithes of Overwatch and Smite pro players who&rs𒐪quo;ve jumped into the playtest. What this means is that your average Timmy who has a fantastic game suddenly feels like they’re the greatest to ever play the game. This multiplies. It infests their mind. Then they might have a bad game. They turn sour – the word commonly used is ‘tilted’. And so pours out the misplaced hatred of my deceased grandparents/my cat/various other horrible things I can’t repeat here. Someone should do some sort of psychological study on MOBA players.
Apparently Valve has been very proactive on reports during the ear🍌ly access of Deadlock. A few posts on Reddit have said that they received messages with confirmation that their reports have resulted in the banning of players. Valve generally has been pretty good with implementing bans in the past for its other big games, but if Deadlock gets as big as I think it might, banning all the toxic players will result in halving the playerbase.
I think a better solution is to oဣffer incentives to be a nice guy. Riot has been experimenting with upgrading its Honor system to offer better rewards for players who behave nicely in-game. It’s amazing how quickly people drop the toxic attitude if ⛦they know they might get a free skin out of it. Whatever Valve decides to do — which might just be nothing, to be honest — I hope that the Deadlock community can get a grip. It’s still early days and I’m already struggling to deal with the background noise of rude weirdos in game chat.
