I have a strong feeling they’ll be working on Deadlock given their experience with third person hero shooters with crazy items that change your build.

Which is a shame because Deadlock is destined for the land of toxicity most other MOBAs exist in unless they do something meaningful to change the game’s design.

Snowballing

30/40min games where you’re unable to concede when loss is clear early on (causing other team mates to become stressed and rude). Games can sometimes be decided in 5 minutes yet there can potentially another half hour to go before you have a chance to requeue with different team mates.

One team mate’s mistake early on can lead to the opposing team snowballing and the rest of the team becomes toxic due to the first point.

The respawn timer increasing in length penalises the team further for being behind the enemy team, and the downtime as someone is waiting to spawn gives them time to type and be toxic.

Macro and Meta

The volume of items leads there to be objectively better builds (and meta after each patch as items stats are changed) leads expectations on all team mates to follow that meta and know which build to play otherwise they get raged on.

Map awareness is more important that aiming and it takes the whole team to remain aware of the map for success.

The lack of transparency as to why a person is losing to another (item selection, ability upgrades etc) irritates players into feeling cheated.

Competitive

As a competitive game, players are trying to prove themselves yet, as a team game, individual performance can’t make up for a weak team thus rage. Competition drives emotion.

I played Deadlock for about 10 matches but all the typical MOBA issues emerged within a couple of games, I’ve already bounced off of it.