Deadlock - An FPS MOBA by Valve.

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Anonitolia said:
Also lol at that rating.
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The "latest" incarnation of Artifact was rated even lower and for a good reason.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1269260/Artifact_Foundry/
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They sold a shitton of copies, publicly announced they'd fix the terrible P2W monetization, had a beta with pro players to revamp the balance... and just never released the new beta, or implement any changes, just delisted everything.
They got away with it somehow.
 
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With the recent layoffs at Hi-Rez Studios, and the future of SMITE 2 being uncertain, if Hi-Rez goes under and SMITE 1 and 2 shut down, would that drive people to play Deadlock? Or is the difference between the games too much that most SMITE players wouldn't switch over?
 
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Thiletonomics said:
With the recent layoffs at Hi-Rez Studios, and the future of SMITE 2 being uncertain, if Hi-Rez goes under and SMITE 1 and 2 shut down, would that drive people to play Deadlock? Or is the difference between the games too much that most SMITE players wouldn't switch over?
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Smite being "pseudo-3D" has always been a gimmick to differentiate it from Dota/League, it had zero verticality and all gameplay was on a plane, it's nothing like Deadlock.
There's also the almost-NFT-scam HoN2 releasing soon, apparently.
 
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Rodeo Roadrunner said:
You know back in the day games didn't need a battle pass, skins, micro transactions, any of that shit to retain players. People played games because they were fun. People sunk hundreds or thousands of hours into games like halo or bad company 2 because they were fun to play, you didn't need corporate tested min-maxed incentives for people to play a game. Hell I remember when dota 2 launched and it didn't have any of that and tons of people played and enjoyed the games without dota+, battle passes, or endless arcana skins. I remember when some heroes like night stalker had no skins.
If that many people have left deadlock, sure you can argue that being a playtest and such affects retention, and people want to go play finished games. But they should seriously consider that something might be wrong with the game if they can't retain player numbers and they keep falling.
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Tbf back in those days the competition was way smaller and every new game was more of a financial cost to have you and your friends play it.
 
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A somewhat big youtuber just released a half-hour analysis of the game. The video is mostly just about the dynamics of the game and how teamwork shapes the game heavily - More or less just stuff that anyone who already played the game for >20 hours would know.
The more interesting part is what wasn't said in the video and probably what is really dragging the game down (well, along with the other jank pre-beta stuff)
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The game is fun, but it's also so unbelivably sweaty that i end up hating myself and every other person in the game every time i queue in. The only people who are invested enough in the game to utilize all the mechanics that differentiate the game from dota/lol/valorant/ow/etc... are sweatier than a Finnish sauna on a cold winter day. When I first started playing the game, I was having a lot of fun exploring and learning all the combos, but now that the casuals have left again it seems like every game becomes an immediate sweatfest. This would've been fine if it was 10 years ago when my time was a lot less valuable, but nowadays locking myself into what inevitably becomes a 45-minute psychological torture session just doesn't have the ring after coming home from my daily 8-hour psychological torture session/work.
If Valve had managed to pull in more normies and casuals with something like waifu skins or more social elements they could've filled this gap and created a fun game with emergent complexity for sweatlords, as well as a playground for casuals. I know that sweat is permanently embedded in the ASSFAGGOTS-genre, but games like LOL did manage to captivate a normie audience despite the fact that it's usually considered the most toxic game in existence.
Right before they removed the ranked queue system I had a lot more fun in unranked queue, since people would generally laugh off misplays, feeding or whatever else, but since you're pratically guaranteed to queue up with at least 2 of the sweatiest motherfuckers on the planet now, you always end up with these people raging at something whenever the game doesn't go their way.

Anyways, I hope the game does get some sort of resurgence soon. I think the majority of Valve staff is preoccupied with HLX (Copium, i know), so hopefully deadlock will get some more love once HLX is done and dusted.

 
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A Shi Piao Teapot said:
Tbh I'm not even worried about this game's future. It's fun, it's a fresh take on the genre, and it's literally an invite-only beta for the foreseeable future. I'm sure once the game has a full, unrestricted release and a handful of casual retaining features it'll do just fine. Right now, however, new and casual players are hopping into a game with a bare-bones tutorial and a 10k+ playerbase of mostly sweats. Also, everyone has to deal with the current matchmaking, which is pretty fucked right now, probably due to lower players overall.
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I'm waiting for a real balance update to drop before playing again. Balance was shit before they released the new characters and I doubt it's become much better with their inclusion.
 
sassblassted said:
Right before they removed the ranked queue system I had a lot more fun in unranked queue, since people would generally laugh off misplays, feeding or whatever else, but since you're pratically guaranteed to queue up with at least 2 of the sweatiest motherfuckers on the planet now, you always end up with these people raging at something whenever the game doesn't go their way.
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Mister Uno said:
I'm waiting for a real balance update to drop before playing again. Balance was shit before they released the new characters and I doubt it's become much better with their inclusion.
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So kind of like what happened with TF2, huh?
Fun when it's not ranked and there's no pressure. Not fun when there's ranking and matchmaking.
 
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GhastlyGhost said:
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I watched the FUNKe video and I do appreciate the moba format in another non-rts shape, so I'd be inclined to at least try it, but dear god does it look like dx8 TF2. I hope the eventual open beta will bring a slew of marketing graphics, game logo, ingame graphics and the lot, cause so far it really just does look like non-saturated clay.

Still, Rivals will 100% shit on this game. It's like how League is 'more fun' while DotA 2 is better but drier.
 
NoReturn said:
So kind of like what happened with TF2, huh?
Fun when it's not ranked and there's no pressure. Not fun when there's ranking and matchmaking.
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Dead Lion said:
Competetive gaming is inherently not fun for everyone exept for a small subset of masochistic perma-virgins.
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The Esports allure is strong for companies, since it essentially creates it's own marketing hype and permanently establishes your playerbase with a mix of sunken-cost fallacy and addiction. In the current economy of attention, Esports is basically a two-pronged attack on boys and young men. You show them these insane superstars and tell the kids that they can become rich and famous like them if they just play enough - You know, play your favorite game enough and you too will be rich and famous. At some point they'll probably start to hate it, but when they get to that point they've spent so much time on the game and so much money on the skins that leaving would essentially be a massive waste of time and money.
I think it's easier for people in the pre-esports generation to think that video games are just for fun, since companies made their money the second a CD or cartridge was sold. Nowadays companies make their money several hundreds, or even thousands of hours after a player got their game in, not to mention that the cash flow only gets higher the more hours someone puts in, so it's no longer about making an enjoyable experience, it's about keeping people in the skinner box where they can exchange money for status in the form of skins. The E-sports element is just a carrot on a stick for the young men who so desperately wants this status and money, but when done right it is and extremely strong pull.

I do consider myself a competitive person, but I've long since realized that it shouldn't come at the cost of fun. It's definitely fun to work together as a team to stop another team, it's sometimes even fun to get stomped by another team if your teammates and chill, but the problem is just that people get too serious about it because there is this vague idea of "I can become the best" embedded in any activity that's against other people. Even without an Esports league, prize pools, or a playerbase, people still get so fucking mad about losing because their shiny emblem might get a lower number on it.

I could actually see it being an insane W for Valve if they actively removed all competetive elements (emblems, rankings, leaderboards, etc) and carved out a niche in the ASSFAGGOTS-industry as the only non-competetive, least toxic and overall most inclusive of all the choices.
 
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The game is pretty sweaty yeah, not that there's anything inherently wrong with it besides the tryhards, but I don't know what new audience they can bring in with this. In my circles the only guys who still frequent the game are the 2-3 buddies of mine who are _really_ into Dota and everyone else, myself included, played a few matches, said "yeah this is pretty good, I'll guess I'll check back once its out of beta" and went back to do something else. And the people I know who game a lot and aren't into MOBAs never even mentioned it.
 
sassblassted said:
The Esports allure is strong for companies, since it essentially creates it's own marketing hype and permanently establishes your playerbase with a mix of sunken-cost fallacy and addiction. In the current economy of attention, Esports is basically a two-pronged attack on boys and young men. You show them these insane superstars and tell the kids that they can become rich and famous like them if they just play enough - You know, play your favorite game enough and you too will be rich and famous. At some point they'll probably start to hate it, but when they get to that point they've spent so much time on the game and so much money on the skins that leaving would essentially be a massive waste of time and money.
I think it's easier for people in the pre-esports generation to think that video games are just for fun, since companies made their money the second a CD or cartridge was sold. Nowadays companies make their money several hundreds, or even thousands of hours after a player got their game in, not to mention that the cash flow only gets higher the more hours someone puts in, so it's no longer about making an enjoyable experience, it's about keeping people in the skinner box where they can exchange money for status in the form of skins. The E-sports element is just a carrot on a stick for the young men who so desperately wants this status and money, but when done right it is and extremely strong pull.
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E-Sports as a whole have been on noticeable decline though, with VC money drying up because the return on investment for E-Sports teams is not good. Valve already cut back on The International for DOTA 2 by removing the Battle Pass from it, which made the prize pool drop from $40 million in 2021, to less than $3 million last year. Riot Games has been merging regional leagues (i.e. NA/BR/LATAM, EU/MENA, and OCE/JPN/SEA) to try to keep it afloat with declining viewership. And numerous companies (i.e. Blizzard killing off HotS's scene, made SC2 hands-off, and cost cut Hearthstone's pro scene significantly, and Hi-Rez recently laid all of their E-Sports staff since they're in big financial trouble right now) have dropped their E-Sports events entirely.
 
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Thiletonomics said:
E-Sports as a whole have been on noticeable decline though
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I feel like it's gone the way of so many other nerd movements
1: A bunch of nerds doing Thing because they love it and think it's fun
2: Thing grows more and more because the initial nerds put all their love into it
3: Big companies eventually catch on and begin normie-fying Thing to market and sell it to the biggest audience possible
4: Thing has now become so normie-fied that the original audience has long since left for something else <------- We are here
5: VC firms keep pumping money into it under the belief that "we keep putting money into it and eventually we will win the market"

Other than E-sports, this shit also applies to game modding, NFTs, superhero movies, and more recently AI.

Thiletonomics said:
Valve already cut back on The International for DOTA 2 by removing the Battle Pass from it
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This was actually a really weird move IMO. People willingly threw ~$90M of pure profit at them for what equates to about a months work for 4-5 artists and a voice actor, and it's somehow a better business to not do it? I remember the writing being on the wall with the Singapore TI being ~$21M less than the last TI, but that was also due to the battle pass being out criminally late compared to the last years, running only for a mere 60 days:
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I'm not saying that 2022 would've beat 2021 by any stretch of the imagination, but surely removing the battle pass was a terrible business decision for valve.

But let's be honest, the magic is kind of dead. Pro players are no longer just gamers who are really good at a game, it's a full-time job funded by giant corporations. Games are no longer a hobby or a pasttime, they are skinner boxes for corporations to suck you dry through. And games no longer draw you in by being fun, they draw you in with Billion-dollar marketing campaigns so they can lure you into the skinner box, where you can swipe your credit card like the fucking paypig you are to them.
 
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chimpSculpture said:
Why'd they change it to three lanes? Four seems way better.
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I think it resolves the issue of solo lanes splitting parties. It also reduces the number of objectives players have to fight over, which encourages players to group instead of having 6 random players doing whatever.
Will this revive the game? I dunno. I have not played in months.
 
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