Community and Media: Following a Game That Never Stops Changing
Deadlock is still in early development, with access limited to friend invites through its playtesters, and that reality shapes its entire community and media scene. Updates arrive constantly, systems shift between patches, and a large share of what players know is compiled by the community itself rather than published as finished documentation. This guide covers how the community participates in shaping the game, where its information comes from, and how to keep up with official media.
Data confidence note: Unless a detail is clearly attributed to an official update showcase, treat it as community-reported and subject to change. Deadlock’s early-development status means builds, dates, and systems are all provisional.
How the Community Votes on New Heroes
The most direct way players influence Deadlock is through hero release voting. Community reports describe a system where new heroes are released two per week, and the community votes on the order in which those heroes arrive. That means the release schedule is not fixed by the developers alone — the playerbase helps decide which heroes show up next.
Votes are earned by simply playing, and the First Win of the Day grants bonus votes, rewarding consistent players with a stronger say in the results. Ballots can be cast in two places:
- The Pregame lobby — here, the winning team’s votes count double, so performance in a match carries extra weight.
- The Hideout ballot box — a secondary place to submit votes outside of matches.
Players who want to guarantee time with a freshly released hero can also rely on New Hero Priority Tokens, which make it more reliable to select a new hero before the crowd snaps them up.
Reported Release Windows
Community-reported information describes specific rollout windows tied to the two most recent update showcases:
| Update showcase | Release days | Time | First release |
|---|---|---|---|
| City Never Sleeps | Tuesdays & Fridays | 2:00 PM PT | October 2nd |
| Old Gods, New Blood | Mondays & Thursdays | 2:00 PM PST | January 26th |
Because these windows are community-reported rather than a formal roadmap — no dedicated roadmap page exists on the official site — double-check exact dates in-game or through official channels before planning around them.
Where Deadlock’s Community Data Comes From
If you have ever searched for a Deadlock tip and found three guides that disagree, that is normal for an early-development game. Community knowledge about Deadlock is assembled from many overlapping sources: beginner guides from outlets such as IGN, SteamDB, and ProSettings; full-match “complete” walkthroughs on the Steam Community and sites like games.gg and deadlocktips; tip compilations; and per-hero build resources such as DeadlockDB Wiki, SoulLock.gg, and MetaBattle.
A few practical caveats when reading this material:
- Some sources are temporarily unavailable. Several well-known Deadlock sites have been protected by Cloudflare or Vercel bot challenges, meaning their pages could not be fetched and had to be substituted with close equivalents. If a familiar site will not load, it may be a bot wall rather than a dead link.
- Community resources include joke content. The Steam Community hosts guides that range from genuinely useful to deliberately absurd — the tongue-in-cheek “How to quit Deadlock” uninstall guide is a good example of the latter. Not everything tagged as a guide is meant to be taken literally.
- Numbers move fast. Item stats, hero tuning, and objectives change between patches, so any build or tier list should be checked against the current build.
Official Media: The Update Showcases
The primary official media Deadlock presents are its major update showcases. Two have anchored the game’s public communications:
City Never Sleeps is a large update centered on a massive visual rework of the map and its neutrals. It introduces six new heroes, a mysterious merchant known as The Broker, HUD and shop updates, an expanded sandbox, and a set of accessibility options.
Old Gods, New Blood overhauls the Patrons and bases, adds another six new heroes, introduces the fast-paced Street Brawl game mode, refreshes the HUD, and delivers a revamped postgame experience with an MVP screen alongside a settings rework.
Beyond these showcases, the official site maintains media assets and official links, and its storefront page hosts the screenshots and assets that community guides and news coverage draw from. When a guide cites “official” information, these showcases are usually the source to check against.
What the Community Is Talking About
Several recent additions have dominated community discussion, and they are worth knowing because they keep appearing in guides and videos:
- The Broker — a wandering merchant who sells demon-touched, or Corrupted, items. He appears in different spots, stays only a few days, and is available for a limited time, exchanging your high-tier items for Corrupted versions. Each match, corrupted items take random negative attributes from a predefined set, so the trade-off is real.
- Haunts — the neutral creatures players once knew have been replaced by a variety of creatures with new behaviors, and their soul value and comparative difficulty are now shown directly in the HUD.
- Street Brawl — a fast 4v4 mode played as a best-of-five over control of the city. Each round lasts a couple of minutes, and everyone starts with equal resources, so there is no farming phase.
- Revamped postgame — a new MVP scoring system and postgame summary, including a graph that tracks every permanent buff collected during a match.
- Accessibility options — dedicated settings for visuals, audio, and controls, covering enemy UI color, VO subtitles with customization, auto move, auto fire, auto mantle, reduced camera shake, and reticle updates.
Staying Current Without Getting Overwhelmed
Because Deadlock ships heroes two at a time on a weekly cadence and reworks major systems between showcases, the most reliable habits are simple:
- Confirm before you commit. Treat any community-reported stat, date, or build as a snapshot, not a permanent rule.
- Use voting to steer the meta. Cast your ballots in the Pregame lobby and the Hideout so your preferences actually influence the hero release order.
- Watch the showcases, not just the guides. Official update showcases are the anchor for what has genuinely changed; community guides explain how to use those changes.
- Expect churn. With heroes, haunts, items, and modes all in flux, patience and frequent re-checking beat memorizing a single tier list.
The through-line of Deadlock’s community and media is participation: players vote on releases, compile the guides others rely on, and react to each update showcase. In an early-development game, that shared effort is as important as any single patch note — just remember to separate what is officially confirmed from what the community is still working out.