Deadlock cheaters are an unwelcome reminder of what ruined Team Fortress 2

Deadlock, Valve’s most poorly guarded secret since 2003, is already a considerable hit among Steam’s ever-growing user base. The hybrid shooter is shaping up to be way more than a novelty and has rarely dipped below the 140,000 concurrent player mark in the past week ever since it was officially announced last week.

Sadly, despite its early state, Deadlock has already caught the eye of enough cheaters to disrupt the game.

Cheaters love Valve games

Video game cheats are part of an industry whose real numbers are hard to find out, but we know cheaters permeate all layers of the competitive ladder in all games affected. Many games even see pros getting caught for illegal activity every year.

What’s weird about Valve’s games is that cheats come by even when there’s no competitive or profitable angle in sight. Team Fortress 2, one of Valve’s most endearing titles, is as close as a shooter can get to a party game. Sure, it later added a competitive mode, but Team Fortress 2 spent most of its life being a fun romp devoid of the pressures we tend to associate with more competitive titles, such as Valve’s own Counter-Strike.

Still, none of that prevented Team Fortress 2‘s servers from first being disrupted by cheaters, then by a swarm of bots so large it permeated every server and barely left any space for regular players to even get in. The issue grew so debilitating and lasted so long that fans sought to make a campaign to beg Valve to save the game.

Valve ended up mostly fixing the problem at some point, but that was the bizarre reality of Team Fortress 2 for a while. All fans are naturally hoping Valve took the necessary notes to prevent something similar from happening to Deadlock as well.

Valve’s new MOBA-like shooter was certainly made with a competitive angle in mind, but the game barely even has any way of measuring one’s Matchmaking Ranking, let alone have a serious ranked mode. It’s still that bare-bones. And yet, it’s not entirely impossible to meet players who will happily lower your unknown MMR by using obvious cheats that render you unable to compete.

In Deadlock, all characters have their own collection of wild abilities, so we’re long past the time when cheaters would just headshot you through a wall. You can now expect all sorts of shenanigans, like enemies who teleport away from you right as you’re about to get killed.

That’s not to say, however, that old-timey cheaters with wallhack and aimbots are no longer a thing —they definitely are.

Those are the classics that you can be sure will always remain preserved.

What’s the thing with cheaters in Valve games?

What’s the point of cheating in Deadlock? Like, really – even if you’re a cheater or a cheat-maker, why out yourself so early on? When Valve can so easily catch the accounts producing weird results among its still small player base and possibly find ways to counteract this kind of software in its infancy?

Are the cheat-makers just too confident that they cannot lose this war, or is trolling Valve games just too irresistible to them? We may never find out.

I’m glad I’m yet to find obvious cheaters in Deadlock, as they have the power to be especially annoying. Finding cheaters in TF2, a game that I can just leave as I please, has nothing on finding them in a game where a match might take up to 50 minutes. Well, probably not that long when cheaters are involved, but you get what I mean.

As of right now, I’m yet to find something to complain about regarding Deadlock, and I wholeheartedly recommend anyone try it as well.