Deadlock’s First-Blood Abandon Rule Is Turning Ragequits Into A Matchmaking Argument

Deadlock’s matchmaking complaints picked up a sharper edge on May 19 and May 20, 2026, after a community tracker surfaced a rule players immediately understood in the worst possible way: matches now count if a player abandons after first blood.

The report came through @deadlockua on X, and the reaction fit neatly into the same distrust cycle that has followed Deadlock’s recent matchmaking changes. Players are not just mad that teammates leave. They are mad that the remaining team can feel trapped inside a match that already looks compromised, then still eat the ranking consequences afterward.

That is why the first-blood detail matters. Before first blood, a match can be treated as too early or too unstable to fully score. After first blood, the game has a clean threshold: somebody died, the match has started in earnest, and leaving is no longer a free escape hatch. As policy logic, that is easy enough to understand. As solo-queue emotion, it lands much worse.

The angry version is simple. If one player ragequits right after an early lane death, the five players left behind did not choose that match state. They did not choose to play short-handed, they did not choose the social meltdown, and they do not want a rank system that treats the rest of the match like a normal competitive loss. That is the complaint driving the backlash.

The opposite concern is also real, even if Valve has not publicly explained the change in those terms. A safe-abandon window can be abused if players learn exactly how to dodge bad openings without consequence. Competitive games need some point where the lobby becomes binding, because otherwise every rough start turns into a negotiation over who gets to leave first.

Deadlock’s problem is that the rule is arriving while matchmaking trust is already thin. Players have spent most of May arguing about deranks, smurfs, low-priority loops, party-vs-solo gaps, and lobbies that feel impossible to read. In that environment, even a defensible abandon rule does not sound like guardrails. It sounds like another way the queue can punish the wrong people.

That does not mean every complaint proves the system is broken. Public posts about AFKs and ragequits are messy, and players tend to remember the match where a teammate bailed far more clearly than the match where the enemy team suffered the same thing. But the first-blood rule gives the frustration a specific hook. It turns a vague “matchmaking feels bad” mood into a concrete policy question: when should a match count?

By May 25, there was no broader Valve explanation attached to the backlash in the material DramaLock reviewed. That leaves the story in a familiar place. The rule may be reasonable. The communication around it may be too thin. And Deadlock players are once again trying to infer system design from the worst match they played this week.