The “Everything Is Imbalanced” Thread Became Deadlock’s First Balance Coping Mechanism

On September 3, 2024, a Deadlock Reddit thread titled “When everything is imbalanced, everything is balanced” became an early coping mechanism for the game’s balance chaos.

The thread was not a patch audit. It was a meme, and that is why it worked. Early Deadlock had the perfect balance-discourse recipe: new players, incomplete knowledge, weird builds, half-understood MOBA fundamentals, shooter instincts, and heroes that could look completely illegal in one match then completely useless in the next.

The top replies captured the loop. Fighting against a hero? Obviously overpowered. Playing as that hero? Somehow made of paper and regret. That is the oldest multiplayer brain disease in the world, but Deadlock gave it a fresh lab coat because the game asks players to understand aim duels, lane economy, ability timing, items, rotations, and late-game scaling at the same time.

This is why the thread matters in the archive. Before the community settled into recurring hate cycles about Dynamo, Bebop, Haze, Doorman, Vyper, Warden, McGinnis, and whatever new nightmare Valve shipped last Thursday, there was a more innocent phase where the answer was simply “all of it is broken.”

That was not totally wrong, either. Early playtests are supposed to be messy. Valve was still throwing numbers at a game whose audience was learning what the game even was. In that environment, a hero being “broken” might mean the ability is overtuned, the counterplay has not spread yet, the item build is wrong, the player is tilted, or the lane partner is farming like a houseplant.

The meme version is funnier and probably healthier: if everything feels unfair, maybe the game is still cooking. The danger comes later, when players stop laughing at the imbalance and start treating every death as evidence of developer negligence.

September 2024 was the cute phase. Everybody was mad. Nobody had enough data. Every hero was a war crime unless you were the one pressing the buttons.