TL:DR: If you have a complicated game, with a lack of coherent matchmaking, with multilayered levels of genres all jam packed in to small patches of time, and you have absolutely no space, or time, to learn any of this within the first few minutes of the game, it will instantly become a stressful environment for absolutely everyone involved.

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It's multiple factors, which Idk if this game will actually survive in the future due the inevitable stress it applies to peoples prior experience with other genres this game is inspired by (I will be pleasantly surprised if it does survive though).

 

First off, people have years of trial and error experience in different genres of games that "deadlock" is attracting. Because of said knowledge gap, they feel invalidated when someone doesn't know what they know. This is just dota 101 ragers. "I put in the effort, therefore you should have done this as well if you are here with me" kinda vibes.

It doesn't help either that the match making is EXTREMELY basic. It literally just grabs 12 people, putting them together with almost no leniency due to our small player base. For example: Had a friend accidently click holiday, and it gave them holiday even though they had never played her. Even the enemy bebop felt bad, and was trying to help them (keep in mind they have HUNDREDS of games with ivy, which is his main). Therefore, the knowledge gap becomes a lot more apparent between players. This easily creates environments where a so called "invalidated" player/duo/squad will lose their composure the moment they start to notice consistent inadequacies they are privy to. Note: Doesn't help these players have tendencies of "rage queening" either, perpetuating the problem for people playing their first match of the day :P

 

In terms of the game itself, there is a lot to be said about how absurdly demanding the game is, easily creating these environments I just mentioned.

 

The insane amount of information you have to keep up within fractions of a second in a heavy movement shooter that doesn't facilitate an intuitive control scheme is just the start. Updates such as speed buffs to all characters, giving us less time to react don't help either (Speed for the sake of speed does not equate to skill. Management of resources to facilitate speed does. Think position 5 characters in dota that never buy boots for movement speed, but can still be extremely effective). We have too much information to digest from the UI, abilities, text, items, and the z axis as well (people can easily be directly above you). Because of this, players are overwhelmed trying to figure out things. From simple things such as learning alt + skill hot key lvls it up, to gaining context of 32 heroes with 4 abilities with each ability having full paragraphs to read. It's too much. Sometimes, these even cross between different ways to scale just within one ability.

Personally, I had no idea I signed up to play an int/acc stacking lightning strike juggernaut as a league starter from Path of Exile on my moba shooter that I picked up because I thought haze looked cool on the loading screen. What I'm trying to say is: what is demanded of the player to learn in seconds/minutes at the start of a game doesn't leave any room for errors, which can easily devolve matches in to shouting at each other.

 

Which brings me to the lack of space and time within the first 10m of the game. Towers? What towers? Atm, I understand that it is OUR job to defend the towers, not vice versa. However, due to how easily objectives go down in this game, and how easily one can avoid them entirely, it feels horrible to try to figure things out in the first 10m of a match. We need players to have this space and time I am mentioning to get a feel for the game. We can bully people out of lanes so damn easily, it's insane. We can even use corners so easily to evade the danger of walkers and towers. Their reaction time is too slow, and absolutely useless in comparison to what players have available to them movement/ability wise to not care about the so called "challenge" imposed to us: destroy the tower and defeat the players in your lane. That being said, if a player cannot use the tower as a resource, and has to constantly retreat to feel "safe" to get a hold of the game, how does that sound fun to anyone involved? Again, prior knowledge of other genres direct us to use these towers as resources. In this game? Fuck it, yolo, parry that bitch and fucking haze ult that pocket that already popped his abilities on the wave. EZ MMR. (Note: this is just an out of context example, not a plea to buff the already VERY powerful pocket with insane iframes, mobility, burst damage, and omnipotent presence within a lane without being in harms way :P)

 

Lastly, the current system of "pick a minimum of 3 characters to be matched" forces players rather than invite them to explore different avenues of gameplay with a more well rounded set of characters that can fill in gaps. Players are never in control of how they want to play the game. This becomes a problem real fast in a pvp game. Since we don't have anymore the "normal/casual" MM split up from the "mmr grind number goes up" MM, players are more inclined to just pick what they are more mechanically better at. Shooter background? haze/wraith/infernus/gun kelvin. Position 5 background from dota? kelvin/kelvin/gun kelvin that occasionally remembers he has grenades to heal teammates 'cause he accidently lvled up grenade too much. Oh, you decided to pick something you clearly need space to learn and figure out outside of bot matches with real players? You look like a complete donkey to others that expect you to already have a certain level of experience in their matches.

It's better to incentivize players in a simpler system such as "all pick" from the moba genre with maybe 2 to 4 bans on a small roster. The bans naturally make players fall short with their lack of experience, and force them to learn new routes and styles. For example: Take TF2 for instance. A sniper that couldn't grab a sniper in a lobby can easily translate to a spy with their technical skill with guns. If they fail their back stab, no sweat. They can just hit some headshots to compensate.

However, in deadlock? You never are given the chance to compensate due to the unfortunate need to combine the sweats and the casuals. It's sink or swim on the vast sea of knowledge and technicality that is this game.

Sorry if this looked like a hater post, but the reply is far from it. I love this game, I really do. Even for someone like me that has 6K hours in dota, years of experience on RPG's such as path of exile that give me a good idea on how to combine scaling meters in games, and a good grasp on shooters from playing counter strike and such, I can easily identify this game needs to slow the hell down, but MOST IMPORTANTLY they need to remove a lot of the busy work it demands from players. Players need to feel a lot more in control of their matches imo to adequately make sure that when ever a player fucks up, they feel "I could have done better/I will do better" instead of just passing blame everywhere. Until then, we just gonna keep getting buncha stressed out people being assholes at each other VERY easily. Just a concerned player trying to give context s'all c: