Image: Valve
Deadlock players can vote to either ban cheaters or turn them into frogs.
Valve’s upcoming MOBA shooter Deadlock has added a novel little feature in a recent update to its playtesting build. The game will now allow players to either ban cheaters from a game or turn them into frogs for the remainder of a match. Frogs are completely helpless in Deadlock, and can only spend the rest of the match hopping around the battlefield.
Here’s some footage of the game’s new frog gameplay:
You can vote to turn cheaters into frogs in Deadlock
Valve has pushed a new anti-cheat update for its upcoming multiplayer Deadlock, allowing players to either ban a cheater from the opposing team or vote to turn them into a frog upon spotting them. Here’s how Valve describes the change in its official patch notes:
When a user is detected as cheating, during the game session the opponents will be given a choice between banning the user immediately and ending the match or turning the cheater into a frog for the rest of the game and then banning them afterwards. The system is set to conservative detection levels as we work on a v2 anti-cheat system that is more extensive. We will turn on the banning of users in a couple of days after the update is out. When a match is ended this way, the results will not count for other players.
This is an interesting way of dealing with in-game cheating, but it’s far from an isolated incident for Valve. The company has clamped down on cheaters in unique ways in the past, such as by adding a honeypot in Dota 2 in-game code to ban 40,000 players in one go. What also makes this anti-cheat method particularly funny is that Deadlock's development is supposedly being led by Dota 2 lead developer IceFrog - making the inclusion of in-game frogs less random than one might think.
Deadlock currently has a 24-hour peak concurrent player count of 125,872 according to SteamDB, and that number is bound to rise exponentially upon a full launch. The company is likely preparing to deal with an inevitable influx of in-game cheaters, but this is a pretty funny way of doing it. However, it’s also preparing for its big launch in other ways.
Deadlock’s new anti-cheat patch also added an all-new playable hero called Mirage to the game. Mirage is able to turn into a whirlwind, shoot bugs that drain enemy HP and passively increase damage multipliers on a chosen target. His ultimate ability allows him to quickly teleport to allies or enemies with a bonus speed boost.
Deadlock does not have a release date yet.