Deadlock players are learning they can pause the match for the entire lobby, and some are using it for evil

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’re about 40 minutes into a Dota 2 ranked match, the enemy Techies is planning on stalling for as long as he can, and some comedy genius decides to pause the match to drag things out just a little bit longer. Bad manners? Probably, but they’ll be laughing all the way to low-priority matchmaking, I’m sure!

The novelty of this feature is probably lost on those who’ve sunk thousands of hours into Valve’s previous MOBA, but its reprisal in Deadlock has players committing heinous acts of psychological warfare for kicks. Just take it from this streamer, who took a breather mid-match to get some recreational gambling in:

psp using the pause feature to play some IRL slots mid game truly a game made by valve pic.twitter.com/pHUyJ7fxFOAugust 26, 2024

To be fair, limited pauses are healthy for a good-faith game, allowing players to stop the clock if a party member’s internet cuts out for a moment or give everyone a second to grab a drink and take a breather if a match gets particularly drawn out. It's the kind of contingency you want in a competitive MOBA, because matches can snowball out of control really fast when teams are uneven. I recall my longest match of Dota 2 was over an hour and a half (I was the Techies player that time, sorry) and while the pause feature didn’t help things go any quicker, it meant we weren’t all anchored to our keyboards the whole way through. 

Deadlock’s not exactly a traditional MOBA, but it shares that team-based competitive spirit, so it’s no surprise that pauses have seen a return here. But for those new to Valve's suite of competitive-friendly features, this is practically a new toy to play with. 

What I’ve learned from various streams is that no one who hears about a pause mechanic and gets excited about it has anything in mind but shenanigans. Deadlock players have been eager to probe its limits to see just how inconvenient they can be; currently, the meta involves chain-pausing right as a match