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:

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 starts (or just before it ends) for maximum nuisance value.

You can see Twitch streamer ohnePixel here immediately burst into laughter and declare “mental warfare” against the enemy team the moment this feature’s applications become evident.

If all this sounds grating, fear not—abuse of the feature can be reported in-game after a match, which I don’t recall ever being an option in Dota (unless you count the option to broadly report intentional ability abuse). Players on Reddit pointed out that dastardly usage of the feature was about as common as you’d expect, which could also lead to legitimate pauses being taken less seriously. Users continue to debate the mechanic’s merit and whether its current implementation is a net positive or not.

“Anyone can unpause so I feel like you need to chain a few together if someone crashes because other team will try to unpause,” wrote Reddit user psyfi66. “But I feel like you should only get a single pause per game per player. With the game being somewhat unstable (which is expected in early access) I feel like the pause functionality is important.”

Still, it’s been something of a hard pill to swallow for those not coming from Dota 2, and there’s an argument to be made that toxic pauses are more impactful in a fast-paced shooter. 

“Even if your friend disconnects or crashes, five seconds is not enough for him to get back. If it were more seconds people would abuse it even more and it would be even more frustrating, so at its current state I don't see the point,” said Reddit user marniconuke. “Imagine being able to do this in games like CS:GO or Valorant, just when a team is pushing the base, you can totally throw them off. I was explained Dota players follow some sort of etiquette around it but since this game is new there's no respect."

Whether Valve will tweak things to curb toxicity or wait and see if Deadlock players use the feature more honorably once the novelty wears off is yet to be seen, but if Dota’s long run is any indication, pauses are likely here to stay. If nothing else, it’ll be a good laugh (and not frustrating at all, I’m not frustrated by this at all, so don’t ask).