A chaotic scamp hijacks Deadlock’s official Discord bot and announces a fake shut down, accusing moderators of lying immediately, and plunges the chat into chaos

Deadlock has been doing well. I've lost 30 hours in the last month to it, and have been having a great time weaponizing all my wasted youth playing MOBAs from years past.

Even in a test build for invite-only, the game's peak 24 hour number is over 130,000. This is not bad, and puts it ahead of fully-released competitors like Helldivers 2 It's the hottest thing. It was therefore all the more likely that a rogue agent of chaos would have waltzed into the Discord server earlier today and caused anarchy.

The longest 2 minutes of my entire life from r/DeadlockTheGame

The message was posted by the server Carl bot, affectionately renamed Bebop after the game's terrifying Dota 2 version of Pudge, a robot that can hook opponents, slap bombs on them, and then knock them into the next week. A few minutes later, server mod Yoshi dismissed the message: "Some bot was used to post this," they explained.

The hacker, searching through their presumably infinite mind palace to find a retort which would further damage Deadlock's image and bring the entire Discord project into disrepair reached into their 296 step plan to sink Valve’s new project and, with a masterstroke replied: "(he is lying)". A bold move.

Deadlock is not going anywhere. Carl is a bot that's widely used on Discord servers. It's a handy little friend, but its ability to be customized can lead to moments such as this. If you have the wrong permissions, anyone could use the 'echo' command to send a message into a channel. It's unclear which devious methods of deception were employed, but I can already see a lot of oopsies if you just glance at the documentation page.

The post was deleted but thanks to the month in the Reddit embed, I was able determine the date of the incident as 1:58 BST (Poland being one hour ahead of the Brits). Scrolling backwards to find the exact moment of the server explosion took some time, as dozens of Discord messages flooded the archives every minute. Here are a few excerpts from the #deadlock channel in the immediate aftermath.

This has also, of course, been fertile ground for other mischief makers to sow more chaos via the medium shitposting. Here are a few of the best ones I found by simply typing "Shutdown", in Discord's search function.

• "I mean Deadlock is blatantly infringing on multiple IPs. Of course Sony shuts them down." I have an Insider who says that Nintendo and Microsoft are joining Sony in a suit."
• "Gabe Newell then asked Yoshi to shut down the game because it wasn't making at least $1m USD per month in net profits. Ricochet 2 is now the focus of all dev resources."
• "BRO IMAGINE YOU GETTING ACCESS AND USING IT FOR SOME GENERIC "WE ARE SHUTTINGDOWN" MESSAGE. The biggest blunder of all time. You could have talked about licking balls."
• "Deadlock has shut down to stop the spread of Vindicta foot fans."

Yoshi would joke about an hour later, between nonsense gifs showing fan favourite Ivy destroying it gargoyle-style. Whoever the roustabout may be, they have achieved absolute chaos.