Deadlock Update: How sad it makes me feel.

[Sympathy]

I thought we were in a great spot!

I didn't mind there being time slots and I thought it was nice to be able to hop on from 6:00 and get a few good games in. It became very natural and made the game feel like more of an experience compared to other Ranked games in things like CS or Valorant where they become the only way worth playing.

Removing it and combining it with regular matchmaking takes away any real idea of lax games for practice. Ranked matches were my "wake up and focus" type of matches and now they're gone. The time slots also set up a nice routine for hopping in discord with some friends and streaming the matches to each other. Each of us intently watching our highest-ranked friends to pick up play styles and other ideas. Now that is totally gone too. we just all hop in together and get some weird skill mixes. It takes away that separate growth time when we can't rely on our shared brainwaves and when we can't be sandbagged by worse friends.

In addition

I play a lot of Mirage and I felt swapping the abilities' positions really threw me off, having focused on him for like a month or two.

The removal of player stores from hovering on names is also garbage.
That was vital information for building counters and helped me get an idea of where my own team was at and who could afford something like Knockdown or suggest a buy for someone who didn't have a useful tool in their kit.

Too many downsides for one update. I'll be slow to warm up to some of these.

How do you feel about the state of the game?
What did you like & dislike about previous ranked matches / the time slot system?
Did you take any comfort in the solo aspect of ranked games?

Update:
https://forums.playdeadlock.com/threads/11-21-2024-update.47476/

[SharkPlush]

Main thing all you negative nancies are missing is all of it:

- Hero MMR is now used in the Matchmaker. Each player will have a "core" MMR and your MMR per hero will be offsets of your core MMR. When you queue, we will match you based on that hero's MMR. So if you are unfamiliar or play worse with a given hero, you will be put in an easier match than your usual. Judgement on your skill and familiarity with a hero will be based on the 20 most recent games with that hero. In your profile, we have UI that shows you what the matchmaker thinks your relative ranking for each hero is (give us feedback on this, we expect to iterate on this calculation).

- Leaderboards are also included per region (North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania). There is a top 1000 Core MMR leaderboard as well as a top 1000 Hero MMR leaderboard for each hero (for each region separately). To qualify for being considered in leaderboards in general, you must have 50 games played in the last 30 days. To qualify for a specific hero's leaderboard, you must have played at least 20 games on that hero in the past 30 days.

- You can queue as any party size, however there are a few details. If the range of skill in your party is too wide, the amount of MMR you can gain will be reduced somewhat based on the degree. This is especially true if it’s a player we don't know anything about (like a very high mmr player queuing with a "new" player, we will minimize updates to the known player until we are more confident we can trust the skill of that party overall).

- The previous limit on high MMR party sizes is increased from 2 to 3. This applies to Ascendant 1 and above. This is the old limit we had on disallowing too many high MMR players to be in the same party together, for matchmaking quality reasons.

- Given the updated no hour limits, if we think a match is a bad quality (like 5am games where there weren't a lot of players to pick from), we will weigh the match less heavily towards a rank update relative to what we would do with an average quality match.

This addresses a lot of problems I had with the game. It was painfully obvious there was a rank hell thing going on because the sample sizes werent large enough, were based on games with busted mechanics that got patched out, no more being a toxic ♥♥♥♥♥ because you looked at someone's rank badge, no more ranking me against chinese guy with 300 ping or russian guy who I guess lives to cheat and pirate movies. Rank including a per-hero component is smart

The only thing I disagree with is how it handles groups but that could be subject to change and it doesn't matter as much. Some details here like the 30 day window and 20 last games are good things. Some games' systems inherently leave you with an average you cant escape after 1000 games and that's why people are making new accounts to try to fix their rank.

And don't tell me "elo hell" can't exist and be engineered accidentally, because it totally can, or devs wouldnt much consideration into preventing it.

[Sumers]

Hahaha what the hell did they do to Yamato?

[PENG]

Originalmente postado por yas:

Main thing all you negative nancies are missing is all of it:

- Hero MMR is now used in the Matchmaker. Each player will have a "core" MMR and your MMR per hero will be offsets of your core MMR. When you queue, we will match you based on that hero's MMR. So if you are unfamiliar or play worse with a given hero, you will be put in an easier match than your usual. Judgement on your skill and familiarity with a hero will be based on the 20 most recent games with that hero. In your profile, we have UI that shows you what the matchmaker thinks your relative ranking for each hero is (give us feedback on this, we expect to iterate on this calculation).

- Leaderboards are also included per region (North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania). There is a top 1000 Core MMR leaderboard as well as a top 1000 Hero MMR leaderboard for each hero (for each region separately). To qualify for being considered in leaderboards in general, you must have 50 games played in the last 30 days. To qualify for a specific hero's leaderboard, you must have played at least 20 games on that hero in the past 30 days.

- You can queue as any party size, however there are a few details. If the range of skill in your party is too wide, the amount of MMR you can gain will be reduced somewhat based on the degree. This is especially true if it’s a player we don't know anything about (like a very high mmr player queuing with a "new" player, we will minimize updates to the known player until we are more confident we can trust the skill of that party overall).

- The previous limit on high MMR party sizes is increased from 2 to 3. This applies to Ascendant 1 and above. This is the old limit we had on disallowing too many high MMR players to be in the same party together, for matchmaking quality reasons.

- Given the updated no hour limits, if we think a match is a bad quality (like 5am games where there weren't a lot of players to pick from), we will weigh the match less heavily towards a rank update relative to what we would do with an average quality match.

This addresses a lot of problems I had with the game. It was painfully obvious there was a rank hell thing going on because the sample sizes werent large enough, were based on games with busted mechanics that got patched out, no more being a toxic ♥♥♥♥♥ because you looked at someone's rank badge, no more ranking me against chinese guy with 300 ping or russian guy who I guess lives to cheat and pirate movies. Rank including a per-hero component is smart

The only thing I disagree with is how it handles groups but that could be subject to change and it doesn't matter as much. Some details here like the 30 day window and 20 last games are good things. Some games' systems inherently leave you with an average you cant escape after 1000 games and that's why people are making new accounts to try to fix their rank.

And don't tell me "elo hell" can't exist and be engineered accidentally, because it totally can, or devs wouldnt much consideration into preventing it.

The only problem I have with the changes: Theres no normal mode anymore. My guess is that they just did it to test MMR, matchmaking and so on and will add normal again later

[Schizm]

Originalmente postado por SharkPlush:

Originalmente postado por Schizm:

The combining of the 2 modes has completely killed my desire to play the game moving forward.

I do not subscribe to the "its just normals" mentality some people have so I avoid normals and play ranked. Now I don't have that option and I have already ran into people saying "its just normals".

This update includes a new version of the matchmaker.

The matchmaker is improved regardless of how it's skinned, that's just my anecdote.

I don't think my issue is if MM is better or not but rather the combination of putting ranked and casual players together that I find is the issue.

MM may very well be better at putting people of similar skills together but if you have 3 ranked players and 3 casual players in a game they are wanting and doing 2 completely different things.

[KnockKnock]

someone invite me

[Kazzymio]

terrible update

[Reqs]

Just to add to the chorus, this game needs a separate ranked queue. The combined queue just makes the games trash.

[Booty Hunter]

Agreed on all fronts. The fact that those who enjoy sweat and those who do not are now forced to coexist when they were happily in their own lanes has tanked game quality. Literally every game has some complete moron with MC syndrome. This was a fun gang up with the boys game and before there were still issues with pubbies, but that was fine because rank didn't matter. 0/5/0 abandon oh well go next.

Patiently waiting for separation again.

[Moldii]

If I even try a little bit as Infernus now the other team leaves. Not fun.

[Kimakaze]

Yeah, Yamato's pretty much useless now unless you buy the ability refresh item. The ultimate has just zero utility that you're pretty much guaranteed to die unless you have that kevlar item. So her entire kit entirely relies on very expensive items to be useful.