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Deadlockis the newest title from Valve Software, combining elements of both third-person shooters and MOBAs to deliver a fast-paced yet strategical competitive experience. Taking obvious inspiration from their past titles, such as DotA 2 and Team Fortress 2,Deadlockhas lots to offer players, whether they’re a fan of the numerous games it draws inspiration from, or new to the MOBA genre looking for a title to jump into.
When starting a game ofDeadlock, the game’s matchmaking system takes a variety of information into consideration, including the players' preferred characters, skill level, and automatically detected region. While these settings are meant to deliver the best possible experience to players, in the current Early Development build, a player’s region also determines at what hours the time-limited matchmaking service is available to create player-vesus-player matches. These settings are largely out of the user’s control, but players have found a way to change their matchmaking region to play against human opponents at any hour of the day.
How to Change Region in Deadlock
Changing matchmaking regions can be easily done throughthe developer console, accessed by pressing F7,and using the commandcitadel_region_override#. By replacing the pound symbol with different numbers, players can change which matchmaking region the game uses when creating a new game. At the time of writing, the available regions are:
citadel_region_override -1
citadel_region_override 0
citadel_region_override 1
citadel_region_override 2
citadel_region_override 3
Oceania
citadel_region_override 5
The currently selected region can be confirmed in the bottom right of the main menu, next to the matchmaking hours information. The selected region will revert to auto-detection after closing the game, requiring players to re-enter the console command if they want to queue into a different region again.
The auto-detect setting is used to select the region that will give players the best possible connection to the game’s servers. By selecting a different region, they will be connected to servers in different continents, greatly increasing the latency experienced in matches.
Why Change Your Region in Deadlock?
The automatically detected region Deadlock decides for players is used to ensure matches created are played on the closest servers available, reducing ping and improving the game’s responsiveness. However, at the time of writing, the current build ofDeadlockis an early alpha, featuring regional curfews restricting the matchmaking server to certain hours of the day depending on the user’s region. While switching matchmaking regions can result in a worse connection to the game’s servers, it also allows players to bypass the curfew present in their native region. The matchmaking availabilities for each region at the time of writing are as follows:
UTC 20:00 – 10:00
UTC 12:00 – 06:00
UTC 12:00 – 01:00
UTC 08:00 – 01:00
UTC 06:00 – 19:00
UTC 02:00 – 19:00
UTC 18:00 – 07:00
UTC 14:00 – 07:00
UTC 03:00 – 17:00
UTC 23:00 – 17:00
