Valve developer has to keep reminding players that Deadlock's anti-cheat system is coming and 'very high priority', since it's leaning mostly on player reports right now

Deadlock is getting anti-cheat software. This is a piece of information you might think is news, based on reactions to a message by beleaguered Valve developer Yoshi on the game's official Discord server. «Yeah we are working on anticheat,» Yoshi writes to an inquiring mind, after discussing the game's ability to bind multiple actions to a key (which allows for some very silly stuff).

If you're curious about Valve's stance on the keybind stuff, Yoshi wrote: «Our plan is to restrict those in the near future, once we get enough of the legitimate uses people have added to the settings menu.» That's not too surprising, given the company's attitude towards programs like Snap Tap in CS2.

It's also not surprising that people are asking about it, considering Deadlock's already getting aimbotters who, for some reason, want to get their power trips out of a MOBA playtest. Valve has a history with this sort of thing, alas—bots have been a plague in TF2 for years to varying degrees. Counter-Strike 2 has VAC live, though even a quick jaunt to the CS2 subreddit shows that, uh, there's probably still a problem.

But this isn't some new revelation: Valve's been working on this for a while. Behold, the power of Discord's search bar made manifest:

How long it'll take the system to be realised, though, and how effective it'll be, is another question entirely. Valve's been gun shy about making the move tokernel-level anti cheat software in the past—that is, software that has the maximum level of authority over your system. Kernel-level anti-cheat is controversial, invasive, and a potential security risk, though some developers argue it's required to keep pace with hack creators.

Instead, the company's bolstered its own huge banwaves with community policing: Player reports, low-priority queues, Counter-Strike and Dota 2's Overwatch system, and so on. VAC bans also help provide an extra anti-carrot to the 'stop cheating' stick by threatening players with closed doors on multiple games.

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