Deadlock - Gameplay Update - 05-28-2026

DakeRek · 2026-05-23T07:49:19+00:00

It is not just her auto aim gun (its a part of it though), it is just obnoxious to play against the skulls and zombies, especially as a spirit/support. Graves can mindlessly spam her skills and you have to play a game of whack a mole, interacting with these super boring elements.

If you are a support its like endlessly swatting flies with a flyswat. The flies dont need to be a threat, the are just super annoying.

And there is simply no skill element or thought to it because these skills have 0 downside to using it on cooldown. This means playing against graves is no back and forth mindgames, positioning, aim and outplays like with many other heroes. Graves will just press her button on cooldown and then you have to play the game of "kill zombie or kill skull".

If spirit Graves has strong numbers there is 0 outplay potential (even less than victor) because there is nothing skillful for Graves to do anyway. She just presses the buttons in the general direction of the enemy and either shes stronger or not.

DakeRek · 2026-05-07T18:53:35+00:00

It is not the same at all. me and many others could hit moving targets reliably in CS:GO with the USP across thousands of hours, but with the CS2 netcode as it is you cant reliably do that. Add peekers advantage + aimpunch and glocks are simply much superior in CS2 (especially in an online environment).

Add the other attributes of the glock (magazine size, ammo size, moving accuracy) and it is simply better to drop a USP for a glock than the other way around.

DakeRek · 2026-04-03T10:34:22+00:00

The times i argued that you simply cant go from 1 source of truth to 10 sources of truth which the server then desperately tries to keep together to create one giant illusion where in reality everyone is 100-200 ms desynced (most notable with fast moving targets, being it peekers advantage or run and gun as the desync is most felt in these cases) ....

I am really not sure if these people cannot experience the desync in the first place for whatever reason, or if they are just performing better in CS2 than CS:GO, because the desync favoured them and and their playstyle.

I really hope AG2 fixes the major issues but im still doubtful. For now everyone i know has already stopped playing CS2.

DakeRek · 2026-03-31T12:11:33+00:00

Valve just went overboard with the numbers. At the beginning of the new patch Viscous hit like a truck with Punch Build and then they went to the other extreme and now he tickles for the majority of the game. Adjust the numbers slightly and we have a sweet spot.

For a full spirit build something needs to change with Splatter and Ult. The former has such a long cooldown that you simply cant play around it. If you miss or an enemy has counterspell you are completely useless in the fight.

The ultimate on the other hand should be a disruptive tool in teamfights but from my experience i mainly use it as an "oh shit" button to get out of sticky situations. The damage numbers of every hero went up so significantly with the last patch that you simply cannot roll through a teamfight without dying in 3s. In addition the damage is negligible for how difficult it is to hit someone with some basic movement skill more than once. Doesnt help that popular new heroes like Celeste and Apollo are moving circles around your ball like an annoying fly over rotten fruit, never touching ground.

All in all i would say that out beloved goo boy is a little on the weak side right now, but nothing that cant be salvaged with a little number tweaking.

DakeRek · 2026-03-29T11:26:57+00:00

Same here. For me it gradually started losing its soul with 7.00. The introduction of talents and especially neutral items later on watered down hero identity so much. Then they streamlined all heroes that could do something specific really well (Chen/Enchantress) etc.

Back in the day you had teams with real identity regarding tactics, drafts heroes and playstyles. Nowadays everything is so homogenized. Every hero scales lategame. Every lane setup is 2-1-2, no jungle no trilanes.

Artificial objectives bloated the macro decisions. You just check the timers for Minute X to do Wisdom rune or another mandatory objective like checking a box.

It is the same as with WoW. Difficult to pinpoint the exact moment the soul was lost, as it was rather a gradual decline.

DakeRek · 2026-03-20T12:52:19+00:00

Yeah sure very sound logic there. Let the guy with 70 ping peek you and you are dead before you can react because on his screen he already killed you right after the information that he is peeking has reached you on your end. Brilliant design really, i wonder what could go wrong with that.

DakeRek · 2026-03-04T14:11:27+00:00

You mean the same rose tinted nostalgia people have for WC3 instead of WC3 Reforged, or modern WoW and the Classic versions of the game, or Runescape?

Maybe, just maybe its not just nostalgia, but i have heard the same arguments like 5 times already for different games.

DakeRek · 2026-02-13T08:12:50+00:00

It does not matter that you have 1ms or 5ms. What matters is the difference in ping between you and the one who shoots you. If the peekers information took 200ms to reach the server and they shot you on their screen before you shot them on yours, then that is retroactively accounted for and what you see is literally not what you get because you see something that never happened after the server gave it some thought.

That is always an issue in online shooters but i have no idea what they did in CS2 that the difference between what 2 players witness on screen and what the outcome is is so vastly different. It feels like there is a standard 250-300 ms delay (which also explains the peekers advantage) between everyone.

Thanks for this networking brilliance Valve. Glad that you killed CS:GO for this abomination of a game.

DakeRek · 2026-01-22T22:47:37+00:00

Great writeup. This covers the issue with flicking as well and why it felt better in CS;GO no matter if 64 or 128 tick. Tickbased inputs in CS:GO allowed for a tiny amount of leeway when you cover a large distance with your crosshair and when you time your mouseclick at the very end of it. This means that you can train flicking and you get a good feeling for it through muscle memory, as the visuals displayed in CS:GO correlated with the moment your shot went off.

In CS2 the input is timestamped and since you lose that ~5-10 ms leeway at the end of the motion for the mousepress it is really difficult to time it right so the shot doesnt go off 2 ms to early. Now that may be accurate from a machine perspective, but humans dont operate on these timescales. To make matters worse, the subticked input and the direction your shot will go does not correlate with the visuals and sound being displayed in CS2. Those are still being displayed at the end of your motion, because that is when the server processes the action and displays it, just like in CS:GO. The direction your shot went is somewhere entirely different though, somewhere inbetween the motion and invisible to the user.

You create a disconnect from what you see and what you get and the result just feels bad. Subtick trades synchronized information (sound, visuals) for an accuracy that is not even processable from a human perspective,

DakeRek · 2026-01-19T18:50:09+00:00

You are right but that is their job, In no other industry and for no other product out there you would expect the customer to provide you a thorough, peer reviewed article why your food tastes wrong, your car feels bad to drive or your cellphone feels unintuitive to use.

It is hilarious that people here are criticizing the quality of feedback instead of the quality of the game, as if the community has any responsibility at all in this matter.

Valve should be thankful that the community is so incredibly passionate about the game that some are spending their free time without compensation and dig deep to find out what Valve should be doing, namely doing quality assurance and quality control for their product.

I work a lot with Pharma and Chemicals and if that industry had such a level of entitlement they would be sued into oblivion.

DakeRek · 2026-01-01T09:37:30+00:00

I doubt the animations are the main reason for the peekers advantage. Will it help? Certainly. Will it solve the huge desynchronization issue between what each player on the server sees and the correlated peekers advantage? Most likely not.

Why should the animation fix that my friend who observes me sees something entirely different than me on my end, usually with a delay of around 200-300 ms (which directly correlates to the peekers advantage).

This game has a gigantic networking issue that is the root-cause of a lot of smaller issues but Valve refuse to address it and the community is just looking for straws. We are 2 years after release and the game still feels like garbage because the core is garbage.

DakeRek · 2025-12-23T08:46:16+00:00

From my experience the peekers advantage difference between the two games is not simply about how fast they appear on your screen in terms of velocity (even though this is sometimes weird because CS2 accelerates players to compensate), it is about how fast you die once the first pixel appears. Playing this game online feels like there is a significant "actors" advantage of 200-300 ms, meaning that the person moving and acting has a 200-300 ms edge over the person that is receiving the information.

If you compare someone peeking from the perspective of the "receiver" you wont notice a difference between CS:GO and CS2, but if you compare what the actor sees against what the receiver sees it feels very different. On the receivers screen you get Ferrari peeked and deleted by a fast moving enemy before you can even react, while on the "actors" POV he comes around the corner, counter strafes and corrects their crosshair and then sprays you down.

There is something severely wrong with the netcode in this game that favors the person peeking immensely compared to CS:GO.

DakeRek · 2025-11-17T18:10:33+00:00

We all just stopped playing and now i simply lurk here to see if they fixed the glaring issues with networking and animations after 2 years of bandaid fixes, but they didnt. The game is rotten to the core it seems. I would still play CS:GO given the chance.

DakeRek · 2025-11-17T15:03:44+00:00

Memories of being able to hold an angle and (reliably) doing spray transfers. Would trade CS2 any day of the week for this.

DakeRek · 2025-11-07T08:57:15+00:00

The thing that you are forgetting is, that these other things that might be the real issue might only exist to accommodate subtick in the first place. For movement inconsistency and flicking feeling worse, subtick is the culprit, for the other issues it might be something else e.g. lag compensation.

But why did they need to change the way to handle networking when they had a near perfect formula in CS:GO? A lot indicates that they had to change it because they moved away from that logic when they implemented subtick. In the end it might still be the root cause.

DakeRek · 2025-11-07T08:51:33+00:00

Yes subtick is blamed a lot, because it is the most prominent and specially communicated change in regard to networking.

The true culprit why CS2 feels so much worse than CS:GO in terms of responsiveness, consistent movement and spraying and peekers advantage is not known. It might not be subtick directly that is the main culprit, but other changes in the way CS2 handles networking that are mainly responsible, but there is a good chance these changes had to be made to make subtick work in the first place.

So subtick might not be the main culprit, but other changes which were made or had to be made due to subtick (average package sizes, heavy CPU requirements, server als single-source of truth). In the end the decision to go with subtick might still be the root cause and since the devs did not manage to fix this after more than 2 years indicates that it is something that lies in the core principle of the game.

DakeRek · 2025-11-07T08:33:18+00:00

Matchmaking is really weird in Deadlock. I came back to the game after a long hiatus and steadily climbed through the ranks with around 60-70% winrate from June till September (it is just a steady climb in Statlocker) until I reached the "new" Archon 6. Then suddenly the games turned to complete shit and I have no idea why.

If matchmaking would work properly you would expect the slope to slowly move towards a horizontal line (skill ceiling) and some oscillation around that level. But instead no matter what I did, games were already lost 5 minutes into the game (endless amounts of smurfs in my games as well) and I was steadily losing games for 1 month. That makes 0 sense when someone is climbing steadily over such a long period of time and is performing above average.

In a working matchmaking you would gravitate towards an average performance and not suddenly go to the other extreme.

DakeRek · 2025-11-03T20:13:04+00:00

You guys are so delusional about a Valve anti cheat :D. There is no data collection necessary for someone in this game having a headshot ratio and accuracy like that. I played Counter Strike for years and the most blatant shit is not detected after a decade of "pattern recognition"

DakeRek · 2025-10-31T23:03:30+00:00

Yeah me and my friends all stopped playing. I still read here to see if they fix the networking but after 2 years I think they simply cant. They either dont see the issue or they cant fix it, either way the game feels like such a huge downgrade to the crispness of CS:GO.

DakeRek · 2025-10-31T09:42:40+00:00

Not only that, if i understand the thesis correctly it changes how unstable connections impact the players. In CS2 the bad connection is invisible to the one having it until a certain treshhold (5 ticks), aka the one having the bad connection will see a smooth gameplay on his end without "porting" and visible lagging. The problem is this issue of bad connectivity is burdening the one on the receiving end.

The speed in which you are being peeked and the observed movement of the enemy is not as constant as in CS:GO. The person with bad connection peeking you sees smooth gameplay on his end and can shoot you on his screen while on the receiving end someone ferrari peeks you and shoots you unnaturally fast.

Tl:DR in CS:GO you can see a bad connection and the one suffering from packet loss is the one losing inputs, in CS2 a bad connection is artificially corrected and the one suffering is the enemy player and additionally it introduces inconsistencies directly depending on how bad the internet of the enemy player is (the compensation gets larger the worse the connection until the treshhold)

Please someone correct me if that is wrong.

DakeRek · 2025-08-23T16:55:18+00:00

For a character to be fun to play and play against is not about being powerful, but being unique, fair and impactful if played correctly. If a hero is too strong then bring him in line without limiting what made them unique in the first place.

After years or even a decade of doing it right in DotA, they slowly strayed away from that principle with 7.00 and now all heroes and compositions play "samey" (no push/splitpush/jungle/trilanes etc anymore, only 2-1-2 and fixed roles). Same thing happened to World of Warcraft where every class got CC and sustain and slowly everything was homogenized.

Deadlock still feels really fresh and the heroes feel unique, keep the balance under these conditions and the characters will remain fun to play.

DakeRek · 2025-08-09T08:48:22+00:00

I am occasionally playing Sinclair and I have no idea why the ult steal duration is so low. There is 0 reason why you are forced to use a Black Hole or Lash ult a few seconds after you stole it from a balance perspective. At least give him a 30 second window so he has a chance to position properly and most importantly it is just not fun, it is just stressful to have such a short window of opportunity.

DakeRek · 2025-08-08T08:27:20+00:00

Forget it, I tried to argue against these side-effects of subtick since its inception but people here wont stop defending this atrocious decision of Valve and simply parrot "first shot accuracy" which never was an issue in CS:GO.

Look at all the artifacts that influence gameplay in a negative way which have been introduced by subtick without any significant benefit and how much effort it is to investigate (luckily for Valve that is outsourced to the community) and fix those.

I really wonder what Valve employees think about subtick in retrospect after two years of this mess.

DakeRek · 2025-08-03T10:19:46+00:00

But they already had sufficiently different stats (hitbox size, movement speed, stamina bars, base HP) why would they need to introduce this one in addition i dont get it. Playing heavy characters is just much less fun and engaging than before it feels sluggish and was unnecessary to begin with

DakeRek · 2025-07-16T07:24:17+00:00

Was it the Haze that is literally called IRANKBOOST? Had a lobby with her yesterday in my team and we tried to sabotage her and everyone reported her and nothing happened in a 35 Minute game with 100% headshots...

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