Valve's latest third-person MOBA-like hero shooter, Deadlock, has had a pretty serious cheater problem, despite still being an invite-only public test. While the game has thus far operated on a player reporting system to identify and punish cheaters, a recent game patch has introduced a rather comical—and seemingly effective—anti-cheat system that can either ban cheating players or turn them into frogs until the end of the match.

Valve says that the new anti-cheat system is set up to be fairly conservative at the moment to avoid any false positives. Aside from the new anti-cheat, Deadlock's September 26 update introduced a new hero, Mirage, whose design and gameplay seem rooted in the jinn from Arabic myths (aka djinn or genie) and added a pretty vast collection of gameplay updates, balances, and quality-of-life improvements throughout the game.According to the update notes, if the new anti-cheat system detects a cheater, it prompts the rest of the players in the game to vote: Either they can kick and ban the offending player effective immediately, ending the match in the process, or they can turn the cheater into a frog until the end of the match and then ban them. It's clear that Valve is having a bit of fun with the reputation that Deadlock has recently earned because of its cheaters, although it says it is working on "a v2 anti-cheat system that is more extensive." It's not entirely clear which anti-cheat system Valve is using for Deadlock, however, it was previously thought to be implementing VAC, as is present in Counter-Strike 2.

You can read the full patch notes here, but it's safe to say that the game is changing rapidly as Valve gathers feedback from its player base, which has reportedly reached well over 100,000 players as of the time of writing. The biggest changes seem to be in the name of fair and fun gameplay, with fixes including:

• Aggressive crouch spamming within a very narrow window will now cause you to very briefly move progressively slower.
• Some latency-related calculation improvements that help orbs be a little less deny favored.
• Side lanes are now a little further apart from the middle lanes.
• Added a Soul Generator (like the one in hero sandbox) in the respawn area. Starts spawning orbs at 3 minutes. Each orb is worth 10 souls when shot. (primary purpose for this is cases when you are very close to an item purchase)

Deadlock is still in early development, and although Valve has given the game an official Steam page, it hasn't yet commented on when the game will be released. That said, all indications point to a 2025 release for the new hero shooter.