Valve has split competitive and casual play in Deadlock, shipping a reworked Ranked Mode alongside a lower-stakes Standard Mode in an update that went live on July 30. The change also brings a rewrite of the matchmaking system underneath both queues.
Standard Mode now serves as the unranked option, with no restrictions on party size or skill spread and no effect on a player's rank. Ranked is the graded ladder, and the current season runs until October 7, after which the highest rank a player reached will be saved permanently to their profile, according to Dexerto.
Qualifying for the ranked queue
Access to Ranked is gated on time spent in Standard. Players must have at least three eligible heroes unlocked before they can queue at all, and can only select heroes they have won a set number of games with — 15 wins per hero, both outlets report. Dexerto additionally reports a requirement of 60 wins in Standard Mode before the queue opens.
The old rank structure has been replaced with 11 tiers — Initiate, Seeker, Acolyte, Sentinel, Mystic, Ritualist, Emissary, Oracle, Phantom, Ascendant and Eternus — each divided into six subranks. New entrants play an eight-game calibration phase, with a soft reset applied to any prior rank to seed them into the new ladder.
Rank Points move by roughly 250 a match, with 1,000 points needed to clear a subrank and 2,000 to break into a new tier, Dexerto reports. Ranked accepts solo players and duos only, and duo partners must sit within one rank of each other; at Eternus that tolerance narrows to three subranks. PC Gamer reports that at the highest end the thresholds shift daily, because so few players occupy those tiers.
Valve expects an unstable first week
Valve has been direct about the short-term cost of the unlock requirements: because most players have not yet met them, the ranked population starts near empty and the system has little to work with.
Expect the next week or so to be very rocky as the ranked matchmaking pool will start off very thin with most players not having the unlock requirements done yet.
Longer queue times and uneven match quality are the expected symptoms while that pool fills. Alongside the queue split, Valve added a pre-game phase that lets players swap to another unlocked hero before a match starts, and raised the number of heroes banned per game from two to three.
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