Deadlock’s New Matchmaking Patch Is Getting Blamed For Deranks, AFKs, And Instant Low-Priority Spirals
Valve’s April 30, 2026 matchmaking overhaul was supposed to make ranks react faster and hero-specific lobbies smarter. By May 5 and May 6, players were already posting that it had turned Deadlock into a slot machine with harsher punishments.
Deadlock is now going into the games which are dead to me list.
On April 30, 2026, Valve pushed a Deadlock update that did more than rebalance heroes. The official patch introduced a new version of the matchmaker, folded normal and ranked into one primary matchmaking mode, switched on hero-specific MMR weighting, and made badge changes update immediately instead of waiting around for a weekly reveal.
By May 5 and May 6, players were already treating those systems like the scene’s newest public enemy.
The loudest version came from @FlintSnowAD, who wrote on May 6 that the “dogshit new matchmaking patch” had ruined the game for them after repeated games with teammates running it down, going AFK, and still dragging everyone else’s rank with them. The point was not subtle: the patch was being blamed not just for bad games, but for bad games that felt punishing in a more permanent way.
That same day, @doritoedges posted that Deadlock had dropped them into low priority after reports from a five-stack over a gameplay argument, turning the patch discourse into something broader than “my teammates are bad.” Once low-priority stories get mixed into rank stories, players stop hearing “MMR tuning” and start hearing “the system is eating people alive.”
And on May 5, @DenzelTwitch summed up the simpler version of the same complaint: matchmaking somehow felt worse than before, with teammates jungling through lost objectives while the other side played like a six-man with a mortgage on mid.
The forum side of the conversation was not much calmer. A thread titled “Possible Low Priority System Bug / Endless LP Queue Cycle” described players clearing low-priority games only to get shoved back into the same punishment pool again, while a newer matchmaking essay on the official forum argued that hero-MMR logic and performance weighting were encouraging smurf behavior rather than preventing it. Those are not the same complaint, but they rhyme hard enough that players are lumping them together into one narrative: the new system is faster, harsher, and harder to trust.
That does not automatically prove the patch itself “broke” matchmaking. Some of this is standard Deadlock behavior in a new outfit: people hate deranking, players always notice the griefers on their team first, and any visible badge movement will make every ugly lobby feel more personal. But the timing is too clean to ignore. Valve changed how the ladder presents itself on April 30, and by May 5 and May 6 the community had already decided the new presentation came attached to worse games.
The deeper problem is that Deadlock players do not just want fair matches. They want a matchmaker they can explain. The moment the system feels opaque, every feeder becomes evidence, every badge swing becomes conspiracy, and every low-priority story becomes part of the same case file.
Right now that case file is growing fast.