Gabe Newell’s new game was finally revealed over the summer, and in August it was a big hit in its “home”… Circana (formerly NPD Group) analyst Mat Piscatella reported that Deadlock had the most monthly active users on Steam in August.
Of course, Valve waited until it had over 18,000 players and a popular subreddit to make the official announcement. Since then, there have even been times when Deadlock has had over 170,000 concurrent players, despite being invite-only and still in alpha status!
Deadlock is a 6v6 team-based hero shooter with MOBA elements (making it a combination of Overwatch 2 and DotA 2) with four lanes, and defeated creeps give you souls to upgrade your hero throughout the match. There are currently 19 of them, each with different abilities (some are healers, some are assassins, some are tanks).
However, the game has had some cheats since the closed beta test, and Valve is aware of this. One of the studio’s developers, Yoshi, used this forum post to explain how they punish players who cheat in ways that are incomprehensible:”If a user is detected as cheating during a game session, opponents are given the choice of either banning the user immediately and ending the game, or turning the cheater into a frog for the rest of the game and then banning them.
The system is set to conservative detection levels as we are working on a more comprehensive v2 anti cheat system. We will turn on user banning in a few days after the update is released. When a match is terminated in this way, the results will not count for other players.
In the video embedded below, you can see how someone turned into a frog in Deadlock and now only has 500 HP, which isn’t much. Any way you look at it, it’s a brilliant idea, and it really shames anyone who doesn’t play by the rules!
Source: Insider Gaming, Bluesky, PCGamer, Valve
This is what cheaters will look like if you turn them into a frog using the new anti-cheat
— Deadlock Intel (@IntelDeadlock) September 26, 2024
