Deadlock's latest pause update changed a feature that was most annoying to stop players from turning their MOBA into a slide show.

Valve has released so many minor updates because Deadlock is still in the early stages. We've seen briefly new heroes, new ways to traverse a map, such as climbing ropes or riding walls, and now, there are changes to the devious Pause button.

Soon after Deadlock went into closed beta, players discovered that they could not only use the pause button for good, but also for evil. I've seen people pause the match mid-fight to trash-talk a team they were about wipe out, and one streamer used it for some recreational gambling.

In the beginning, players were allowed to pause their game as many times as they wanted. While most people didn't use this feature, a few matches felt like a slide show because someone kept pausing. In a video uploaded by a player to Deadlock's Reddit, you can see how bad it can get. Players can barely make it out of spawn.

As another player points out in the thread below: "People get perma-banned for this so just report them and hopefully the number of people who want to ruin the game for others, will diminish."

This issue was addressed, sort of, in one of the most recent patches. One of the Valve developers responsible for Deadlock's updates briefly addressed the issue of pausing in a recent update. Players can only pause once per game. Teams can only pause up to three times. The game application will flash if the game is unpaused. It's not a lot, but it will at least prevent players from repeatedly stopping games to cause chaos.

I'd personally rather there be no pause button at all, as even when it's used minimally, it can still be quite frustrating--especially when the match is about to end. It can be useful if a teammate disconnects randomly, as they'll have at least 30 seconds before the match ends to fix their connection.