There’s no greater pain in a MOBA than seeing your favorite hero swept into the swirling void of unplayability by a hero ban, but it’s a necessary evil, at least for buttoned-up ranked play. Bans make picking and counterpicking more interesting and keep imbalanced characters off the field while players wait for a balance patch—and to my delight, Deadlock has finally got them. Well, sort of.
What it’s actually added is a “prefer to avoid” toggle you can assign to one hero from the game’s roster when queuing for both standard play (which is always ranked) and Street Brawl, the new casual mode analogous to League of Legends’s ARAM or Valorant’s Spike Rush. You also can’t avoid new heroes, which currently just applies to the six characters from Old Gods, New Blood.
The patch notes, which you can find on Deadlock’s feedback forum, call this a hero banning system, but there are a few reasons for both why this is different and why it might be necessary for a game in pre-alpha.
Most ranked modes in MOBAs have a draft phase—a pre-game lobby where both teams take turns selecting heroes for their team and banning them so that no one can play them in that match. In League of Legends, for instance, each player locks in a ban before anyone picks a hero (without seeing what the other team has banned) for a maximum of 10 unique bans.
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