Deadlock dev discusses Valve's progress on perfecting MMR, 'It'll be more effective once we finish a full rewrite of the matchmaking system'
Deadlock's MMR is a bit all over the place right now. But this isn't entirely unexpected from a game that's only been out in closed beta for just over a week. Luckily, it seems like the devs have some upcoming plans for improving match-making.
Some of the developers on the official Discord server (which you can access via an in-game link) are pretty good at answering players' questions. Over the weekend, one such query happened to be whether there is any MMR matchmaking in Deadlock currently, whether that be for overall teams or down to specific lanes.
"Though the hero-based MMR one doesn't work very well at the moment," one Valve developer who goes by "Yoshi" on the Discord server says. "It'll be more effective once we finish a full rewrite of the MM [matchmaking] system we are working on."
I've not had any major issues with Deadlock's MMR so far, but there have been a few instances where the matchmaking is pretty chaotic. Usually, when I'm playing by myself, the fights seem kind of even. But whenever I play with friends, any kind of MMR gets thrown out of the window, and we flip from stomping the enemy team to getting beaten to a bloody pulp.
But apparently, this experience is universal for most Deadlock players at the moment: "I either smash my lane or have some crazy person who denies all my creeps, secures all last hits, gets my tower, and kills me five times before two minutes, lol," one player says. I can usually tell whether the upcoming match is going to be absolute hell by whether the enemy team is denying my orbs or not. If they are, then they're displaying basic cognitive skills, and I'm in for a world of hurt.
It's also true that matches that should be pretty even can sometimes be let down by one or two players on either side who maybe can't keep up with the action or pace of fights. I even had one player telling everyone, "Please, can we all just calm down for a second?" because we had about three consecutive team fights at the gates of the enemy's base.
This is also to be expected, considering how new Deadlock is. If you have someone on your team who's acting like they've never played the game before, then they probably haven't. A constant influx of new players can also make match-making difficult, as many players probably haven't had their MMR calibrated properly yet.
I'm just treating the current matchmaking system as a placeholder. It is doing the best job it can until Valve can update it and implement something more concrete to help players find the right kind of games for their skill level.