When was the last time we could play a polished AAA game just for the fun of it?

We don’t really get games like Deadlock anymore. It’s a high-profile title with innovative gameplay ideas and a handful of rough corners, with absolutely no intention of taking your money or chaining you into a Skinner box just yet. It’s fun because it’s chill, and it’s chill because it’s fun. There’s absolutely nothing at stake when you boot up a fun game of Deadlock. And long may this continue.

Deadlock MMR? I hardly knew her

I love how Deadlock is like Whose Line Is It Anyway? for now – the rules may not be made up, but the points definitely don’t matter. You just don’t get this anymore with AAA games, with predatory toolkits researched to psychological perfection to maximize engagement and transaction count. It reminds me of different, more innocent times.

Yes, third-party sites like DeadlockTracker gave us a rudimentary glimpse of the numbers game, but they were swiftly shut down by Valve, with the devs noting that “the hero-based MMR one doesn’t work well at the moment” and that “it will be more effective once we finish a full rewrite of the MM system we are working on.” So, for the time being, it’s all a joyful mess, reminding me of the days from more than a decade ago when I was just gleefully running around on third-party Team Fortress 2 servers with no ranking or scoring ladder to worry about.

This isn’t to say this is a perfect solution. I’ve read all about Activision’s secret SBMM experiment on the CoD player base, cover to cover, not just the summaries: it’s pretty clear that the removal of ranking criteria makes games less fun for all but the very best of players on the server. But perhaps there is one aspect of this that is ignored in the discussion, and it may be the emerging boomer speaking from deep inside of me.

You see, with no ranking ladders to climb, no loss feels like a setback, and victories are fun on their own. Meanwhile, having a bad teammate or a superstar carry are both equivalents of divine intervention; nothing a mere mortal can do about it. And even better, since there are no ranks to matter, I’ve hardly encountered any of the usual toxicity of MM, with people taking an “it is what it is” attitude to an underperforming teammate rather than the arsenal of cusses we’re all familiar with.

Remembering Artifact (and not because of the memes)

Deadlock still has a long way to go, and many pitfalls to avoid – the swift and painful demise of Concord shows how fraught the modern gaming landscape has become and that there are no guarantees of success regardless of the talent and the team behind a game. Hell, Valve themselves also had to take a painful L a few years ago in the form of Artifact, which, for the purposes of this discussion, does hold an interesting gem of a memory.

You see, as a fairly hardcore TCG/CCG nerd at the time, I genuinely enjoyed the game, and while it had tons of issues, including a bafflingly barebones feature set, the strategy aspect of Artifact was genuinely deep and compelling. But in retrospect, I was surprised to see how much more fun I had with it before the MMR system was introduced. Having a hard-fought, long game that ended with a loss wasn’t stinging; it was an enjoyable experience.

Right now, I feel the same way about every Deadlock match I play, and it’s liberating.

Make no mistake, this won’t last. Even if Valve continues to behave in its distinctly Valvian way, many of gaming’s modern trappings are no doubt on their way to Deadlock, if only based on the stuff we’ve seen in Dota 2 and CS2. Skill-based matchmaking, ranking ladders, cosmetics up all the orifices all the time, a never-ending avalanche of new characters and content, the endless, savage, clawlike assaults in a bid to snatch your free time and spare change. But in the meantime, the subtly shifting sands of slow and – oh, how beautiful this word can be sometimes – meaningless competitive romps are a pure joy to experience.