Valve's latest arena shooter Deadlock has been generating hype for a long time, with recent concurrent player counts exceeding 170,000 at one point, according to SteamDB. More recently, however, reports indicate that cheaters are already invading Deadlock, despite the fact that the game is still in invite-only public alpha testing.

As shown in a recent Reddit post containing a kill-cam video from Deadlock, a supposed cheater very brazenly appears to use a wall hack to track an enemy through a wall and pre-emptively dodge an attack. In the clip, the gamer who spotted the alleged infraction, this isn't even the first time they have encountered the same cheater in-game, and there are countless reports on both Reddit and the Deadlock forum reporting similar experiences.According to previous posts on the r/Steam subreddit and the Deadlock forum, the punishment for cheating is severe, with both your account and the account of the player who invited you getting a ban for the offense. While Deadlock doesn't seem to have an anti-cheat built into the game just yet, Valve encourages users to record deaths and kills and report cheating and toxicity on the forum. It's likely that Deadlock will use Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) when it nears full release, meaning anyone caught skirting the rules could be subject to bans in other games using the same anti-cheat system—most notably Counter-Strike 2, DOTA 2, and several Call of Duty games.

It's entirely possible that the absence of automated anti-cheat in Deadlock is intentional—at least while the game is in alpha testing. This could be a low-stakes way for Valve to get a good idea of how both players and cheaters behave in these scenarios, what software and strategies cheaters are using, and how they are manipulating the game's mechanics or code. Moreover, in an alpha build of any game or software, there are almost certainly going to be stability issues which could be picked up by an anti-cheat system, making relying on manual reporting a safer bet in that regard.

Update Sep 13th: A Valve developer that goes by the name Yoshi online has reportedly confirmed that the development team is actively working on implementing anti-cheat for Deadlock.