Everytime I try deadlock I end up playing against 800 hours veterans and I get thoroughly destroyed.

Best time to play as a new player is during these big updates since more new are playing.

That's just the MOBA experience. There is a lot of DOTA DNA in Deadlock and unfortunately you just have to power through that initial period of suffering. Is it worth it? I don't know that I would condone picking up a MOBA in this day and age since I care about others' mental wellbeing, but it is a good game.

They've created separate casual and ranked play options now, so that problem is basically solved.

For those who don't know, you can play for free if you get an invite, and the Deadlock discord has an entire channel for getting invites. I got one within ten minutes of asking.

The game is superb. Great gameplay, great art direction, great writing. If you like hero shooters you need to give this one a try.

lol now try an extraction shooter like Marathon. Fantastic game but the genre intentionally puts you through loss after loss, especially at first. It's a lesson in detachment.

Hero shooters can be like that too, but it's not core to the genre I think.

Not really. Many other competitive games have ranked and casual lobbies but that doesn't really stop sweats from going into casual lobbies to trash on casual players.

I'm slower at these games and it took me around 100 hours before I kind of knew what I was doing, and im still executing it poorly. Most of learning was just understanding who all the characters are and what the people playing then tend to want to do.

Only way to learn that is constant limit testing and failing. And you have to not get upset when things are going bad. You can't just grind 8+ hours a day and expect to get better, you have to only play when you want to or in a good mood. I only get 2-3 hours where I can play and be fully into it, after that my brain stops remaining in full focus, and I just build bad habits and start playing it like a brainless call of duty shooter. Know when to call it a day, you learn and get better by doing something daily for at least 15 minutes. Its about consistency not pure hours.

I haven't played in forever, but tried again when they released the aram equivalent and that really helped me learn the new updated items, and get a feel for team fights with less pressure. In the real game team fights are hard to read what's going on and when someone is trying to engage, when you are trying to check mini map, worry about other lanes, urn, mid boss, etc.

You have to have one hell of a mindset to play mobas, and then also at minimum a decent aim for the hero shooter aspect. I played league of ledgends more than CS go so I tend to play more utility players, or will build more spirit power with characters who have good poke and rely heavily on bullying from a distance in lane phase with geist, or seven. It gives me slightly better odds of not getting my ass completely stomped and I can at least come out neutral on the laning phase.

Even before the discord, I put my friend code in a comment here and got an invite the next day (and it only got scraped by 1 bot)

Hasn't been a problem for me so far

its steam forums are literally nothing but posts for giving invites

The new characters are overpowered as hell, besides that and the terrible punishment system this game is quite fun.

Just hope it doesn’t go full esports.

Casual lobbies have hidden MMR so you're still getting matched with people around the same skill level.

My group plays it regularly. Fantastic game. Looking forward to seeing what valve does with it in the future.

MMR is kinda crap and is readily manipulatable with little effort. If you want to tank your MMR in casual so you can go trash on people, it's incredibly simple.

Trolls and griefers unfortunately exist and have been a constant problem in any PvP game since the advent of PvP games.

It's currently an invite only game, so the amount of trolls and griefers that would do that sort of thing are potentially being filtered.

Plus there is always the potential for "just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen."

As I mentioned elsewhere, getting an invite is the easiest thing in the world. It's doing absolutely nothing to filter trolls and griefers.

When I set out to try a new moba I play around and try all the characters (or at least the meta ones), which is like the first 25 games. Then I focus on one that I like and try to get good with that one so that I have at least a one trick pony. At that point you can start to slot in other characters situationally. Problem is that that's 100s of games just to learn how to play, much less to become a little competitive. The lower levels of competition are not necessarily people that are bad mechanically, they just don't understand the game. It reminds me of WoW in that the people at the top levels of the game are the most unemployed.

Also, some people have bad mmr, not because they are bad players, but because they are so incredibly toxic that they either int when they don't get their way or they dog other players into playing poorly or inting themselves.

Waiting patiently for that sweet sweet pve mode