I’ve recently been bombarded by people’s increasingly idiotic opinions on Deadlock’s balancing and now you all get to suffer because of it. I will argue that the way people are discussing the hero kits in Deadlock is both indicative of a shallow understanding of the games mechanics and detrimental to continued development of the game should the developers listen to this, building out my theory of competitive game balancing along the way.
A bit of background on my own history with MOBAs: I started playing League at my friends insistence during the equivalent of middle school, right after Xin Zhao’s release and the start of Season 1. I kept playing the game with different friend groups all throughout high school and eventually fell off the game as these friend groups disintegrated going into university, mostly stopping around 2018. I picked the game back up for spells here and there, but largely didn’t come back for an entire season since, but since it was the main game we all played almost every day, I am sure I have accrued in excess of 50k hours in the game easily. While the social aspect was the biggest one in getting me to stop playing, the increasingly boring designs of new champions and a greater insistence from Riot themselves to force the meta into spots they found “correct” definitely helped in that decision. Since then, I have also played a good deal of Dota 2 (435 hours at time of writing), which, when learning about its mechanics and meta and design properly, has felt like a massive revelation on all the parts Riot fucked up when designing League to be more approachable and fast paced. I have since gained a great appreciation for IceFrog and his team’s approach to designing MOBAs and especially hero kits. What initially felt like a bunch of wildly overtuned, but severely clunky reject designs - when viewed from a league player’s perspective - quickly turned into some of the most interesting designs I have ever seen in a multiplayer game like this. When Deadlock arrived in 2024, I got an invite somewhat quickly and quickly recognised a bunch the ways in which Dota had been designed, from cloned items to similar approaches to hero kits.
Opus contra Riotam, or: Why you don’t optimise against frustration
Since mostly dropping League and getting my MOBA kicks largely from Valve, Youtube Shorts has seen fit to keep recommending me clips taken from Riot employees streams talking about many different gameplay design decisions they had taken over the years. These clips by August, Yelough and TAFKA Endstep (Nick Fridge) have been supremely enlightening on what I think has gone wrong with League’s development and direction. Please note that I am not blaming any of these guys for the deep-rooted issues with the game, they were (and are) clearly working within the bounds and expectations set by management and the design culture at the company. Recurring perspectives from those three, that I had seen come up time and time again, are often surrounding “frustration” and finding an “audience” for systems and characters. There seems to be a fear at Riot, that if parts of the game, like a specific ultimate or basic kit, an item, an objective causes too much friction with the player base and disrupts what they think of as the smooth operation of the gameplay loop, players will leave. Similarly, the company is committed to reworking perfectly functional characters if the player base for them is too low - i.e. they “lack an audience”, the worst example to me here is the butchering of original Aurelion Sol into the nothing version he is today, because of his originally very excentric play patterns. Both of these movements contribute to a culture in which the rough edges of the game are being continuously filed off to produce something highly marketable and smooth, that ultimately lacks any sort identity, which becomes especially noticable in the perceived sameyness of many new character kits. The design concepts have become so “optimized” that every archetype of character gets to exist in only a very narrow design spectrum and demands the appearence of, e.g., mandatory dash abilities on almost every melee character.
Where this approach to design, that seeks to tightly control the player experience in every match in order minimise friction, leads to me is best exemplified by Riot continued embarrassing attempts to curb one of the principal game mechanics in the MOBA genre: Roaming and lane swaps. People - mostly on the lower end of the rank segment, but also notably pro players - had been complaining about the way in which lane swaps and aggressive roaming and ganking had made the game feel bad. It is worth noting here that pro players by and large had been complaining about the fact that in almost every pro-level game, top and bot lane for one side (usually red) where switched and supports or top laners often ended up escorting the jungler on first clear or joining them for invasions. Anyone who has only played Dota will have to note that by default, league expects lane setups to be mirrored, meaning both safe lanes play in bot and both off lanes play in top. The fact that pro players noticed the problems created by radial map symmetry and the advantages of having an off lane carry or bruiser focused on disrupting the safe lane carry is very unsurprising to Dota players and would seem to be a non-issue, but to Riot, this blended with complaints about the potential gains of heavy early rotation plays - and simultaneously the massive disadvantages creates by poor execution in lower elo brackets and solo queue - and thus seemed to eventually necessitate top-down intervention, that has taken some pretty bizarre forms. Initially, the ideas was to first auto-ping the player attempting to do an early gank or rotation to let them know that they aren’t allowed to do this, then turn off EXP gains for them the lane partner they were trying to help and even having the enemy towers buffed to oneshot on such a early gank happening.1 This was largely ridiculed and so Riot went back to the drawing board, eventually landing on Role Quests. This system is currently implemented and generally adds an extra meter to fill for every role that only fills if you are being a nice little lane chud and do things like farming, killing your lane opponents or taking parts of the enemy tower. The benefits are so enormous, like a 7th item slot for bot carries, an extra teleport spell for top laners etc., that losing out on them is highly detrimental to your potential performance, and thus roaming ganks - especially from supports and top laners - are heavily dis-incentivised. Lane swaps themselves are also entirely impossible since progress is only granted for being in your assigned lane based on role position.
Zooming in on Macro
To me, this is design you resort to when you feel helpless against the amount of freedom the genre your game is set in gives players and runs antithetical to what makes these games interesting to play and thus directly contributes to making every round feel highly similar. To any Dota players reading this who have not kept tabs on League this feels like genuine madness I assume. Dota, moreso than any other multiplayer game, thrives off of the fact that every character has to have a somewhat unique kit and purpose and thus playstyle. There are, of course broad roles, but mid lane alone can have such entirely different feeling characters run up against one another: From a farm focused carry like Sniper who will eventually out-range your entire team and turn you into mincemeat if you’re prepared to deal with him, over gank-focused control characters like Pudge or Broodmother, to gank-heavy assassins like TA and full casters like Zeus, Dota 2 lives and dies by the fact that games will have vastly different shapes and play patterns depending on how you and your enemies have set up your teams and how well each side is capable of exploiting their strengths and the enemies weaknesses. Dota has also thought about the question of how high the incentives should be for ganking, and largely has answered: “High, if you can support it”. For the League-players, Dota notably has kept buyable wards in tact and so safe lanes on either side are often heavily protected with vision, while supports in those lanes battle for control of the vision and parts of the nearby jungle - the lane camps and general map design is also something that makes dota substantially more interesting long term than League ever can be, but that’s for a different time. Dying to a gank is very often the punishment for losing the vision game, and often much less of a micro-test than League’s ganks end up being. Similarly, both recovering from a gank and the cost for missing out on one are potentially very high, since the amount of gold contained in waves is just much higher in Dota and a big learning point for newer players is often that consistent and safe farming is the best skill a carry player can develop until pretty late into the game when their kit and items have fully come online. The high cost of good carry items versus the low cost of good support items, as well as the general lack of ability damage/healing scaling across the board makes for weak carries and strong supports early, and the inverse in late.
To really sum things up properly: Dota 2 has largely remained focused on ensuring that success at the game is directly tied to a good and thorough understanding of the games macro and your ability to execute on that macro, while the need for micro is tied directly to a character’s kit and role and thus varies substantially across characters. You can find a character that operates well within the amount of micro you can handle, but there is no character or role you can chose that exempts you from understanding the macro well, even in low ranks. League, on the other hand, is constantly attempting to flatten and file off the stranger and harder to grasp parts of the game at all stages and has reduced the amount of necessary macro by simply forbidding you to do things they find to be hard to balance.
Fairness is not a design goal
This brings me to the concept of fairness as its being brought up in discussions around character kits. Recently, for example, Riot announced they would remove the much maligned ability of Mel to reflect spells with her W, which many players felt was “unfair”. I have also heard a lot of hemming and hawing about which ults or abilities in Deadlock are “fair” and, thus, by implication “balanced.” To me, the way this discussion has been going points to a fundamental misunderstanding many non-Dota players have about how kit design can work. As an example, take a favourite safe lane carry of mine, Faceless Void.
FV is a little piece of shit, whose signature ability is his Chronosphere, a big dome he can place close to him that fully freezes everyone inside in time, except for him, who acts and moves faster inside the dome and gets to hit everyone inside for up to 4.75 seconds at max rank. Being a hard carry, this means he will kill at minimum one person caught inside. The dome pierces debuff immunity and cannot be dispelled, the only way to escape is external forced movement. On top of this, he gets a dash that restores all damage taken in the last two seconds, a chance to hit an additional time and mini-stun, and a debuff that causes enemy cooldowns to tick slower and deal damage for every spell they have that’s on cooldown. To my League player brain, this initially seemed like complete madness, how are you meant to deal with this guy? He blinks in, stuns your team and kills you all before you can act. He can even buy and pop Black King Bar before engaging to become debuff-immune himself for 5 seconds so the engage becomes impossible to overcome?
The secret of course lies in the fact that FV is very slow to move and, even with his dash, is not very agile at all. He is a melee carry, which already puts him on the back foot compared to ranged characters and the limited cast range on his Dome means his dash mostly exists as a way for him to even deal damage at all and remedy all the damage he is taking while just attempting to get in range in the first place. Other hard melee carries get to have proper high range blinks, invisibility or hard evasion in order to overcome their range issues, and so FV ends up being relatively underwhelming in practise and more of a niche counter pick against carries with, e.g., high sustain that get their benefits removed by being hard stunned. Cast and movement animations in Dota also mean that there is usually a brief moment the enemy gets to react to FV’s engage that make it much harder for him to pull off what he needs to do.
My point here is that looking at FV’s kit from the perspective “does this feel fair when it hits me” is a fools errant that does not give you an accurate understanding of how well balanced FV is in the context of the game. This, to me, is the underlying fallacy people keep falling into again and again with Deadlock - we finally made it!
Haze is busted but its not her ult
The current meta in Deadlock at time of writing I would argue is largely balanced okay, but we have a few outliers in the positive direction that are worth examining. The biggest issue right now seems to me to be Haze, but many people have been pointing to how “unfair” her ult is in order to show whats wrong with her. On paper, the argument seems compelling, since the ult causes her to incapable of missing, gives her huge evasion that makes it impossible to effectively gun-murder her while its active and deals absurd amounts of damage that can be extremely hard to avoid if she catches you while stealthed. I would argue, however, that the ult being largely unfair is the point. As a gun hyper carry, she ultimately exists in the same niche as a Dota safe lane carry or League ADC. She is meant to start the game out underpowered and slowly scale through buying expensive, but highly efficient items that make her damage scale out of control over time. She is meant to be a team ending threat in the late game, if you have let her scale and don’t buy counter items. Haze’s ult may be unfair, but so is popping Metal Skin and suddenly taking no more damage at all. Or Cursed Relic’ing her and seeing all her damage stop instantly. Neither of these items offer any counter play and are directly designed to be functional answers to give your team the tools to deal with the out-of-control carry. Where Haze currently is genuinely busted, imo, is the design of fixation and the way it allows her to deal truly nasty damage from minute one, which actively clashes with the trade-off that’s meant to be inherent in her role. Since fixation applies in a 1/2 applications per hit/headshot respectively, she gets to effectively bypass bullet drop-off and even spread to an extend, that do make other on-hit debuffs like Mina’s Love Bites or Infernus’ burn ineffective at high range. This ability to stack and maintain her debuff and basically all lane ranges makes her extremely punishing to play against in lane at all and requires you to have very consistent threat of nuking her out of existence to keep her from running away with the lane and the game very fast, which is a big issue. Reducing fixations early scaling, limiting it to one target (which would be closer to its name anyway), or changing the way its applied to be closer to other such debuffs would help make Haze be less oppressive in a phase of the game that is meant to be her weak point.
Similarly, many other abilities and especially ults I have seen described as “unfair” or “non-interactive” I have found to be rather poor points of critique for the affected characters, since they largely ignore what items you can use in response, what macro needs to have happened for the ability to be effective and what the design goal in making it difficult to deal with once properly used might have been. Examples include Dynamo’s ult, Violet’s homing 1, Silver’s ult, etc. Fair is not a synonym for balanced: The most fair ability ability with tons of counter play can still be balanced to be too strong, given ability scaling and lack of resource needed to use abilities, and an unfair ability can be total dogshit. Insisting that every time you die, you should have been able to dodge something or have otherwise been outplayed, limits the ability of game macro to be a major factor in game outcome - something IceFrog and the team continue to clearly be interested in - and obfuscates so many of the non-immediate ways in which you can fail to play correctly that cause you to be killed in an “unfair” way. Balance and general fairness in competitive games is an important factor - you shouldn’t simply lose the game for getting the short end of the picks, after all - but its important to recognise that they are at direct odds with design variety and interest: A perfectly balanced MOBA would contain only a single character kit that does the same for every player, after all, and that’s just reinventing Call of Duty TDM. I would love for people to take a few steps back and examine whether the kit designs they are ranting about are actually detrimental to game, if they simply have not properly reacted to the ways in which you can actually prevent being in a situation that feels unfair. Many designs that feel “unfair” often want to clearly funnel you towards playing in different ways or countering them in specific and work together with your team to properly utilise all the tools at your disposal. Even past discourse, I think many people’s enjoyment of MOBAs in general and Deadlock in specific would increase tremendously if they focused on the options available to them - many people still underestimate substantially how quickly you can farm 6400 souls for a counter item in mid to late game - and the ways in which they can refuse the enemies fights from a position that lets them be “unfair.”
Buy more Cursed Relic, dumbass.
Footnotes
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQuT57H8CDI for context on the planned changes. ↩