Valve punishes cheaters of Deadlock in the best possible way, turning them into helpless and frogs.

Since the closed beta test of Deadlock, some players have found ways to cheat and gain an unfair advantage. Frogs are a new way to fight back. No, I didn't misspell 'frags'.

Yoshi, a Valve dev, recently shared a Deadlock update that gives players a new way of combating cheaters. "When a cheater is detected during the game, the opponents are given the choice between banning him immediately and ending the game or turning him into a frog and banning them afterwards," Yoshi said in a forum posting.

"The system has been set to conservative detection levels while we work on an anti-cheat system v2 that is more comprehensive. After the update, we will start banning users. "When a match is terminated in this manner, the results won't count for other players."

Here's a video showing a player who was caught cheating and desperately trying to escape an enemy team that is beating them to a pulp. You won't survive long as a frog that hops slowly with only 500 health.

This is a great way to punish players that break the rules. It's annoying to play a match against someone who is clearly aim-botting, even though Valve has been very strict in punishing those found guilty. I think that cursing cheaters, and turning them into frogs is a reasonable response.

You shouldn't be worried if you accidentally fight with a cheater. If the other team votes to continue the fight using your sixth member as a "frog", then the match result will not count. In other words, innocent players will be forced to play a losing 6v5 game (plus a frog). Everyone wins, except the cheater.

Some players are not as happy about this change. One player said, "Someone is going to find a method to turn this frog in to the Baldur's Gate 3 terror to solo win the match." I wouldn't rule this out, but I would hope that Valve, as they continue to work on the v2 anti cheat system, could find a way to track if the frog has gained godlike powers by hacking. It's a bit of a death-joke move, but it would be better to stop the game than have frog, destroyer worlds, beat me up.

But that's another problem. I'm happy that Valve is doing something to combat cheaters in Deadlock. Valve announced at the end of August that it had a dedicated team of developers working to combat cheating, as well as an online review group to monitor reports of cheaters. It's great to finally see the results of all this hardwork.