Deadlock dev talks about Valve's progress in perfecting MMR. 'It will be more effective when we finish a complete rewrite of our matchmaking system.'

Deadlock's MMR has a lot of different aspects right now. This is not entirely surprising for a game which has only been in closed beta for a little over a week. It seems that the developers have some plans to improve match-making in the future.

You can find some of the developers who are very good at answering questions on the official Discord server. Over the weekend, a player asked if there was any MMR matchmaking for Deadlock, whether it be for teams as a whole or specific lanes.

One Valve developer, who goes by the name "Yoshi", on the Discord server, says that the hero-based MMR doesn't work well at the moment. "It will be more effective when we finish the full rewrite of MM [matchmaking] we are working on."

I haven't had any major problems with Deadlock's MMR yet, but there are a few times when the matchmaking can be pretty chaotic. When I play by myself, the fights are usually pretty even. When I play with my friends, MMR is thrown out the window and we go from stomping on the enemy team to being beaten into a bloody pulp.

One player said that this is a common experience for Deadlock players. "I either smash my lanes or have some crazy person deny all my creeps and secure all last hits. They get my tower and kill me five times in less than two minutes," he said. I can tell if the match is going to be hell by whether or not the enemy team denies my orbs. If they do, they are displaying basic cognitive abilities, and I am in for a lot of pain.

It's true that some matches that should be fairly even can be let down by a player or two on either side that can't keep pace with the action. One player even said, "Please, could we all calm down for a moment?" We had three team fights in a row at the gates of our enemy's base.

It is to be expected given the newness of Deadlock. If someone in your team is acting like they have never played the game, they probably haven’t. Match-making can be difficult with a constant influx of players, as they may not have calibrated their MMR properly.

I'm only using the current matchmaking system to act as a placeholder. It's doing the best it can until Valve updates it and implements something more concrete to assist players in finding the right type of games for their level.