Getting in

You sign in with Steam. LOCKIT never asks for a password — Steam confirms who you are and tells us your ID and nothing else.

Queueing requires a public Steam profile. This isn’t curiosity: a hidden profile means we can’t read your match history, and a platform that can’t read your history can’t prove you played the match it’s about to rate you on.

Account age

182 days minimum

Deadlock playtime

100 hours minimum

Steam profile

Public — game details and playtime visible

These are the defaults. A hub can set its own, and during test nights they may be relaxed deliberately — the join screen always tells you which gate you failed and what it wanted, rather than refusing you without a reason.

The queue

Queueing happens in windows, announced in Discord. Nothing queues off-hours by design: a windowed night concentrates everyone into one pool at once, which is the only way a community-sized scene can hold a tight rating band.

A match forms when 2 compatible players are waiting. Compatible means their ratings sit inside one band — the band starts tight and widens the longer the front of the queue has waited, so a quiet night still pops, just looser. You can queue as a duo; you’ll be placed on the same team.

Leaving the pool before a match forms is free and always will be. Closing the tab counts as leaving: if the site stops hearing from you, you come out of the pool rather than being drafted into a game you aren’t at.

The draft

Teams are picked by captains, not assigned by an algorithm. The two highest-rated players in the pool are the captains, and the lower-rated of the two picks first — the compensation for having the weaker captain.

Pick order

Snake — 1, 2, 2, 1 — starting with the lower-rated captain

Time per pick

60 seconds

On timeout

The highest-rated player still on the board is taken for you

Sides

The captain who picked second chooses Amber or Sapphire

Duos are seated onto teams before picking starts, so every player on the board is a solo. This is not a courtesy to duos — it’s structural. If captains could pick one half of a pair, a captain with a single seat left could strand the other half and the draft would have nowhere to put them.

The draft never stalls. A captain who walks away has their picks made for them on the clock, and the side choice resolves to Amber if nobody makes it.

Hero bans

After sides are chosen and before the lobby exists, each captain bans 2 heroes. Bans alternate, starting with the captain who picked first. Banned heroes are off the table for both teams.

Bans each

2, taken in turn

Time per ban

60 seconds

On timeout

The ban is lost. Nothing is banned for you

That last one is the opposite of how pick timeouts work, on purpose. A pick has to happen or the match has an empty seat. A ban doesn’t — and taking a hero away from twelve people based on a guess about what an absent captain wanted is worse than taking nothing.

Nothing stops you picking a banned hero in the game. Deadlock’s custom lobby has no way to disable one, so we don’t pretend otherwise. What we do is check afterwards: the match record says which hero every player used, and it gets compared to the ban list.

A broken ban is recorded on the match page and left to a human. It does not automatically void the game — the other eleven people played a real match, and destroying their night to punish one person is the worse outcome. Repeat offences are a conduct matter.

The ready check

Once the draft produces two rosters, everyone has five minutes to confirm. All 2 must confirm before a lobby is created.

The order matters and it’s deliberate: the lobby is only created after everyone has confirmed, because the game’s own lobby has a fifteen-minute clock on it. A lobby opened for a roster that turns out to be two people short burns that clock for everyone who did show up.

If the five minutes run out, the match is voided. Everyone who confirmed goes straight back into the pool keeping their original place in line — you are not punished for someone else’s absence.

No-shows

Missing a ready check you were drafted into is the one thing LOCKIT penalises, because it’s the one thing that costs the other 1 people their night.

The first one is free. Pug no-shows are mostly life happening — a doorbell, a crashed client, a dog. A platform that punishes the first miss teaches people not to queue unless they’re certain, which starves the pool far worse than the occasional no-show does. Repetition is the corrosive thing, so that’s where the cost lands.

Offences count over a rolling 30 days. Older ones stop counting — coming back after a few months off shouldn’t mean serving a day-long timeout on your first night.

Your record is on your own profile page. Nothing is hidden from you.

The lobby

LOCKIT creates the custom lobby for you and posts the party code. The bot sits in a spectator slot and starts the match itself once the seats hold the right people.

The lobby is set to publicly visible, on purpose. Valve only produces match data for custom games marked public — a private lobby is one nobody can ever verify, including us. That’s the trade: the game is listed while it fills.

It costs nothing, because the match will not start unless the players in the seats are exactly the players who were drafted. Someone wandering in delays a match by a minute; they cannot play in one.

Verification

Nothing counts until it’s verified. After a match finishes, LOCKIT pulls the real match record and compares who actually played against who was drafted.

Verified

All 2 drafted players are in the match record

Held for review

Short by one or two — a human decides

Rejected

Anything less. It never becomes a result

This is the whole point of the platform, and it’s the reason ratings here mean something. A result nobody can check is a claim, not a record.

Verification isn’t instant. Match data reaches us through the community Deadlock API, which fetches it from Valve under limits none of us control, so a night’s matches may take a while to land. They are not lost while they wait.

Who won

Valve does not publish statistics for custom lobbies — the kind LOCKIT runs. Your rosters and the heroes everyone locked come from Valve’s own lobby record, so those are checked, not claimed. The result itself is the one thing Valve never tells us, so we ask the two captains.

Both captains agree

The match verifies and rates immediately

Only one answers

Their report stands after 15 minutes

They disagree

An admin settles it. No rating moves until then

Anyone else reports

Ignored — only the two captains count

Only captains, and only one from each side, on purpose. Two people on opposing teams agreeing on a result is evidence: a captain cannot inflate their own record without the other one signing off on a loss they didn’t take. Ten teammates agreeing with each other would prove nothing.

Every match says how its result was established — Valve’s record, both captains, a single undisputed report, or an admin. We publish which one it was rather than rounding it all up to “verified”, because they are not the same claim.

Reporting a result you know to be false is a conduct matter, and the report carries your name. See Conduct.

Rating

Your number is LR — LOCKIT Rating. It moves on wins and losses against the strength of who you played, not on kills, damage or any personal statistic. Beating a stronger team is worth more than beating a weaker one.

Placements

10 verified matches

After a season reset

5 matches to re-place

Leaderboard activity

At least one rated match in 14 days

While you’re in placements your LR is hidden — from you and from everyone else. It exists and it’s moving; we just won’t show a number we don’t yet trust, because an early number is mostly noise and people anchor to it anyway.

Going quiet removes you from the leaderboard, never from the ladder. Your rating is not lost or decayed for inactivity — come back and it is exactly where you left it. The leaderboard is a picture of who is playing now; your rating is a record of how you play.

Voids and corrections

A match that never started, never filled, or can’t be verified is voided. A void is not a loss and is not recorded against anyone.

If a match is voided after it was already rated, every rating it touched is recomputed from placements forward, so the correction propagates through every result that followed instead of leaving a wrong number frozen in place. Corrections are appended to your rating history rather than overwriting it — the record shows what happened and what was fixed.

Conduct and disputes

Throwing, griefing, smurfing on an alt, and abusing people are all grounds for removal. These are judged by humans in Discord — no automated system decides them, and none pretends to.

If you think the platform got something wrong, say so in Discord with the match link. Every match, draft, ready check and rating change is stored, so a dispute is usually answerable from the record rather than from memory.

Rules change as the platform learns. Material changes get announced rather than quietly edited in.