Reddit’s New-Player Meltdown Said Deadlock Was Throwing Fresh Players Into Meat Grinders

On February 1, 2026, Deadlock Reddit produced one of the clearest retention panic posts yet: “Can’t imagine how many new players this game just permanently lost.”

The poster said they tried Deadlock again with interested friends and ended up in lobbies full of players with enormous time advantages. According to the account, those friends finished the day with no interest in reinstalling. The thread then turned into a pile of similar stories: new players showing up in mid-level games, experienced players feeling bad for them, and returning groups wondering where the other beginners were supposed to be.

This is not the same as the general “Deadlock matchmaking is bad” complaint. It is sharper. Bad matchmaking can make a veteran angry. Bad onboarding can make a new player leave before they ever learn why the game is good.

The thread’s core accusation was that new or returning players were being placed too high and adjusted downward too slowly. Whether every rank detail in the post is perfectly described is less important than the pattern of reaction. Players understood the damage immediately because everyone has tried to sell a difficult multiplayer game to friends. You get one or two sessions before curiosity turns into “yeah, I am good.”

Deadlock has a brutal learning stack. A new player is not just learning aim or one hero. They are learning lanes, souls, denies, items, walkers, rotations, urn pressure, zipline rules, ability combos, and why the person screaming at them is somehow both correct and unbearable. Put that player against someone with hundreds or thousands of hours and the match becomes less a game than a public onboarding failure.

The ugly part is that nobody in the lobby wins. Veterans get a teammate who cannot function yet. New players get farmed into paste. The matchmaker gets blamed. The friend group quietly moves to something else.

That is why this Reddit thread deserves its own archive slot. It is not just another stomp complaint. It is the social version of matchmaking failure: if Deadlock cannot protect the first few sessions, every excited friend invite becomes a retention stress test.