Valve doesn’t want Deadlock tracking sites yet—and fans are happy to play along

Not long after Deadlock was confirmed, stat-tracking websites started cropping up, but it seems Valve doesn’t want them just yet.

This comes from ws, the developer behind Deadlock stat site Tracklock. “Valve’s turned on even more aggressive rate limits and now there are no new games being tracked,” announced ws in the site’s Discord server on Sept. 5. This lines up with Deadlocktracker’s status—which emerged as another community-run stat site for the game—with both sites only showing data from matches up until Sept. 3.

Stat sites are an integral part of MOBA games. They come in handy to check hero win rates and high ELO replays. But given Deadlock is in an invite-only early playtest phase, it doesn’t come as a shock that Valve wants as little third-party intervention as possible. Naturally, the Deadlock community has generally responded positively to the change in a Sept. 5 Reddit thread.

“Justified, I can understand that Valve wants as little outside bullshit and ego effecting this as possible, of course it always will to some degree but it’s a good idea to mitigate it in a playtest,” said one player.

Another player expressed relief at Valve’s decision to lock down the stat sites for now. “I began to get worried when I saw all of the stats websites pop up and people started parroting the win rates of heroes. It pollutes the data, which is so bad when the game is literally in alpha,” they said.

Deadlock is ramping up to be one of the biggest releases in the coming years. As the MOBA-shooter hybrid marches ahead to its full release, it has already reached 171k concurrent player count on Steam.