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Matchmaking
This page tracks every patch note change to Matchmaking in Deadlock. The patch notes list 42 changes across 21 patches, from May 13th, 2024 to January 30th, 2026. Every change is listed below, newest first.
Archive details 21 patches · 42 changes
Each change is one line of the patch notes.
First recorded: .
Change History
2026
- Full patch
- Added hero banning to Standard Mode and Street Brawl. You can now select one hero in your roster screen (using middle click) to tell the matchmaker that you prefer to avoid that hero. When the game starts, it will tell you which heroes were banned. We are doing just 2 total bans for now. This does not affect new heroes in the initial release window.
- Parties of 3+ players now need to have an additional hero in their roster (from 3 to 4)
2025
2024
- Full patch
- Added an Extra Competitive option to allow players to control what type of players are placed on their team. If you prefer to play with higher levels of coordination, communication, and competitiveness, then you can use this option to tell the matchmaker to build your team with like-minded allies. This option will sometimes be inactive in scenarios where the pool is very shallow (large portions of Eternus, off peak hours like 5am, extremely long queue, etc.), but otherwise in most normal scenarios the matchmaker will attempt to find you similar players.
- The recent change to increase party size allowed at the top MMR (from 2 to 3) reverted for Eternus and up, but maintained for Ascendant
- The matchmaker will now try to prioritize each team having at least 2 frontliners when it has the option to do so
- Full patch
- This update includes a new version of the matchmaker. The matchmaking pools are no longer split between normal and ranked, there is only one primary matchmaking mode and there are no limited hours.
- Badges will update immediately whenever you gain or lose enough MMR to change badges. You no longer have to wait a week or play a certain game count. There will sometimes be monthly global maintenance updates where we readjust the global curve based on the population, cheaters banned, recalculation adjustments, etc (this will be done as needed and not necessarily every month).
- 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).
- 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.
- If you prefer playing with only solos, there is a convar (mm_prefer_solo_only true) you can use.
- When queuing as a party, you will have an option to override the default balance oriented lane assignment system and make the system prioritize putting your party members in the same lanes together.
- Full patch
- Added 6 new heroes to Hero Labs, a new experimental hero matchmaking mode. The heroes are Holliday, Calico, Wrecker, Fathom, Viper and Magician (temp names). The goal of this mode is to invite players to help us in giving hero design feedback while heroes are in very early phases. Most heroes in this mode will have placeholder models, names, effects, etc (some exceptions are older in-dev heroes that had more developed art). They will also sometimes have placeholder/copy-paste abilities for certain slots if that ability slot is still TBD (such as Magician ultimate). There will be a specific hero labs section on the forum to post feedback on these. Heroes in this mode will often be removed, abilities changed, new heroes added, removed heroes re-added, etc. Patch notes for changes to heroes in this mode will be posted on the Hero Labs subforum. This mode will have limited testing hours for now while we gauge activity, in order to ensure faster queue times. You must have at least 50 games played to be able to queue here. If you don't get a new hero selected (since there are less new heroes than there are players), you will be considered higher priority for subsequent matches to get a new hero from your roster selection.
- Abandoning Co-op bot matches with more than one party now brings up the Abandon Match confirmation warning instead of leaving immediately
- Full patch
- Full patch
- We have adjusted the matchmaking schedule to not be split across many different hours throughout the day, primarily to help address queue times. There will now be a wider continuous, but more concentrated, set of hours that it is enabled in. The schedule is now more simplified as well, as there is no more user selection component.
- Full patch
- Full patch
- Full patch
- Full patch
- Matchmaking is now open 24/7 for all regions
- There is now a low priority queue. The primary way to enter this is through abandoning games, but it can include other behavior. You must complete the required amount of games (escalates based on low priority frequency) to be able to return to using matchmaking normally.
- New players that are queued solo will only match with other new players until they get 4 wins
- A 6 player party will no longer match against solo players. This may result in longer queue times for 6 stacks.
- Fixed being unable to invite offline users to a party
- Full patch
- Full patch
- Full patch
- Full patch
- Full patch
- Full patch
- Added Asia servers and matchmaking region. Testing times for this region are Mon-Thur 5PM to 3AM and Fri-Sun 3PM to 3AM in China Standard Time (GMT+8).
- Added South America servers and matchmaking region. Testing times for this region are Mon-Thur 5PM to 3AM and Fri-Sun 3PM to 3AM in Atlantic Standard Time (GMT-4).
- Parties will now be a little more likely to be in the same lane, if there isn't a wide skill gap or other factors preventing it
- Full patch
- Full patch
- Added EU servers and matchmaking region. EU testing times are Mon-Thur 5PM to 3AM and Fri-Sun 3PM to 3AM. Times listed are Central European Summer Time (GMT+2).
- Removed the invite requirement of Steam friends having been on your list for a number of days (affected normal user cases often where friends weren't on the Steam list, and we have other metrics and tools on the backend now that we can use to filter for other cases)
- Full patch
- Full patch
- The match will no longer start at a fixed time immediately after 12 players are in the queue, sometimes it might start faster sometimes it might start slower, depending on the distribution of players in the queue. There will still be an upper bound for how long it waits, for practical reasons, but it won’t automatically start asap if it knows the match won’t be good. Conversely, if the match is already reasonable it won’t wait unnecessarily to start it.- Parties that have too high of a gap between the players in them will often make for a bad experience for both teams, but especially the opponents. When we detect that your party has this composition, we will present a warning letting you know that this will result in a more difficult match for your party and might also take longer to find a game, so you can decide if you value the group/social aspect more or not. In terms of specific matchmaking changes, in cases where the party has a large gap in skill, the party’s overall skill will now be biased closer to the best player’s values rather than the average. This will make it less likely that the system grabs lower skilled players for the opposing team just because your party was ok with wide variance.