7-33 since holiday patch, long term matchmaking problem

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Something feels very very wrong with my matchmaking lately. I am aware that I'm not good at this game, but the mm should be placing me against players who are similarly skilled. Instead, I am constantly being put into games where my whole team is clearly worse than their whole team. For several dozen games now.

It would be one thing if I were obviously tanking every game, but my performance is consistently very average on my team. Maybe 2-3 games where I'm clearly the worst player. My team is simply almost always worse than the other team overall. I have been tracking stats because of how persistent this has felt, and the results are difficult to read as bad luck:

* At the 20 minute mark, my team is down an average of 13k souls and 10 deaths over the last 20 games.
* In the last 25 games, my team has been up in both souls and kills exactly *one time* at 20 minutes.
* Two other games where we were up in either kills or souls but not both.
* That makes 22 out of 25 games where my team was down in *both* categories at 20 minutes. And again, we're not down by a sliver, we're down by an average of 13k souls and 10 deaths. At 20 minutes! 88% of games in a meaningfully large sample that were not lost on a late team fight; they showed a clear mismatch from the very start.

I love this game but it's demoralizing to be in this situation over and over and over again. If I need to rank down, that should happen and my win rate should remain close to 50%. Instead, I'm ranking down and the competition does not seem to change. Every game is me and 5 players who are about as good as me (or 2-3 who are similar and 2-3 who go 1-15) against a team of 6 who are all clearly better than us. The stats seem to confirm this pretty clearly, at least as much as they can in a complicated game like this.

What is happening?
 
Edit: played and added 6 more games: now over the last 20 games my team is down an average of 15.35k souls and 12.75 deaths at the 20 minute mark. I was very bad in three of them (playing brand new characters) but still on par with multiple other teammates.
 
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The matchmaking algorithm is likely based on ones for CS2 and DOTA2; games that have hundreds of thousands of players all across the world every day. Whereas Deadlock gets a 20th of those numbers daily. Outside of peak hours in most regions (weekends, late at night, when people are less likely to have obligations), the only people playing are more likely to be the monstrously skilled and the guys who got in last week. And so the Matchmaking algorithm has to create high skilled parties to aggregate a "balanced" match up of players, creating the kinds of matches we mostly get where 1-2 people on either team are the only ones able to play.

It will get better as time goes on, but with how demoralizing it is, it might be worth taking a break until the game is in a more accessible place. The update in January is speculated to come with a faster paced and lower skill requirement game mode, so we'll see how that goes. It does worry me that they're just kind of... letting MM sit like this. They have to know on some level it's not working as intended most of the time.. i can't imagine this is helpful for feedback and testing, but what do I know. I'm sure the secret private playtests have better matches the lucky bastards....
 
The matchmaking algorithm is likely based on ones for CS2 and DOTA2; games that have hundreds of thousands of players all across the world every day. Whereas Deadlock gets a 20th of those numbers daily. Outside of peak hours in most regions (weekends, late at night, when people are less likely to have obligations), the only people playing are more likely to be the monstrously skilled and the guys who got in last week. And so the Matchmaking algorithm has to create high skilled parties to aggregate a "balanced" match up of players, creating the kinds of matches we mostly get where 1-2 people on either team are the only ones able to play.

It will get better as time goes on, but with how demoralizing it is, it might be worth taking a break until the game is in a more accessible place. The update in January is speculated to come with a faster paced and lower skill requirement game mode, so we'll see how that goes. It does worry me that they're just kind of... letting MM sit like this. They have to know on some level it's not working as intended most of the time.. i can't imagine this is helpful for feedback and testing, but what do I know. I'm sure the secret private playtests have better matches the lucky bastards....
You're right, I have a question. If Deadlock has such a low player count, then how can VAC-banned accounts get invitations, or how can high-ranked smurfs constantly switch accounts? They should address this as well, otherwise, if they just clean up the smurfs, will there be no players left in the game?
 
that thread is kinda cosmetical at this point I am sure devs doesn't check it ever, there are +18 website bot comments in that thread bro.
Valve barely cares about this forum at all. Everyone here is screaming into the void. I'm actually surprised it's still running at all.

There is a secret closed beta branch with players who they listen to. Everyone here they only vaguely pretend to listen to. I wish they would just be honest for once.
 
I'm having the exact same experience. The seasonal event encouraging players to bring heroes they can't play into matchmaking certainly isn't helping. I am a new player, I know I'm not very good, but the people I'm getting matched with on my team are somehow leagues worse than I am. And of course, the enemy team always seems to know exactly what they're doing. It's so demoralizing having it happen game after game after game.
 
I'm having the exact same experience. The seasonal event encouraging players to bring heroes they can't play into matchmaking certainly isn't helping. I am a new player, I know I'm not very good, but the people I'm getting matched with on my team are somehow leagues worse than I am. And of course, the enemy team always seems to know exactly what they're doing. It's so demoralizing having it happen game after game after game.
Same here.
 
You're right, I have a question. If Deadlock has such a low player count, then how can VAC-banned accounts get invitations, or how can high-ranked smurfs constantly switch accounts? They should address this as well, otherwise, if they just clean up the smurfs, will there be no players left in the game?
I don't think there's any blocking on counts that have previous VAC bans to get in; the invitation system isn't that complex. Any steam account with a friend already in can be added to the game, for better or for worse. I agree those need to be sorted out, but CS and DOTA have those too, unfortunately Valve isn't great at stomping those out
 
that thread is kinda cosmetical at this point I am sure devs doesn't check it ever, there are +18 website bot comments in that thread bro.

If you look at the online members, Yoshi, the game's director is online ALOT on the forums, He's DEFINITELY seen complaints and is also active in the discord.

The problem with the matchmaking is disparity between ranks due to a low player pool.

The skill ratings aren't averaged out in number of players per pool so, you'll end up with lopsided matches, since it needs to find you a game if it can't find one where every player is in in your core skill rating.

There's 14k players active right now, how do you think that's spread out between 11 skill ratings?
 
If you look at the online members, Yoshi, the game's director is online ALOT on the forums, He's DEFINITELY seen complaints and is also active in the discord.

The problem with the matchmaking is disparity between ranks due to a low player pool.

The skill ratings aren't averaged out in number of players per pool so, you'll end up with lopsided matches, since it needs to find you a game if it can't find one where every player is in in your core skill rating.

There's 14k players active right now, how do you think that's spread out between 11 skill ratings?
That's not all: think about regions too. If you're playing from anywhere besides Europe & North America you'll have even less players to go around. This is probably why they got rid of the ranked/non ranked queues back in the day and why Hero Labs was almost never played: Deadlock just doesn't have the player numbers right now thanks to it not really being out yet
 
That's not all: think about regions too. If you're playing from anywhere besides Europe & North America you'll have even less players to go around. This is probably why they got rid of the ranked/non ranked queues back in the day and why Hero Labs was almost never played: Deadlock just doesn't have the player numbers right now thanks to it not really being out yet
You're right, I agree completely. It would be nice if they put a little more effort into it, for example, Bebop sticky bombs. :)
 
You're right, I agree completely. It would be nice if they put a little more effort into it, for example, Bebop sticky bombs. :)

bebops sticky bombs got buffed last night, and he got some other considerable, but minor buffs along with it last night, it's the newest post in the 12/29 changelog.
 
That's not all: think about regions too. If you're playing from anywhere besides Europe & North America you'll have even less players to go around. This is probably why they got rid of the ranked/non ranked queues back in the day and why Hero Labs was almost never played: Deadlock just doesn't have the player numbers right now thanks to it not really being out yet

There's still technically "ranked queue" but it's an option in the social tab of the settings. Extra competitive tick mark tells the matchmaking to try to balance teams based on skill rating as closely as possible, but because of the issues both you and I made note of, the queues are even longer when you have that option selected. Though the games are much closer with that selected.
 
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Especially during this December (2025) I for one also feel the matchmaking more of only takes "kill-death"-ratio into account majority of times.
Echoing this post:

Now "of course" at the moment, according to "Statlocker" and (possibly) many other entities, I am a type of a player who is considered as the bottom-worst primarily due to lack of player-last-hit-kills even with high "KDA"-ratio but more importantly the management of the "macro"-goals
( lane fixing / repairing, resource stealing and securing, etc. ).
https://statlocker.gg/profile/25016464/performance
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50223914 stuck with braindead teammate,s some playing for the first time. could not take any guardians. its so bad 2 players rage quit by 15 minutes. retarded waste of time
 
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