This mechanic NEEDS to change. (Update: It did.)

[@Deathy]

UPDATE: This has been hotfixed by Valve. We did it! :D

[@zeldalink78]

nice

[@blabibuu]

But how tho ?

[@VentusNovus]

Damn that was fast. What did they change?

[@gabriel63680]

@@VentusNovus ​ @blabibuu Fixed players being able to exploit soul sharing across multiple lanes to earn more souls than intended. The way the fix is implemented is that each player can only be considered for an enemy trooper death event 4 times per wave number during the laning phase.

[@lada-1337]

We did it Reddit!

[@DizzyFi]

The alpha is PRECISELY the time to complain about stuff so it can be fixed. My personal suggestion is that either the lanes need to be harder to rotate to or the sharing mechanic needs to be changed in some way because I didn't realize before 10min all souls in a lane are duplicated, not split like afterwards.

[@fullsoul5727]

i think nerfing rotations/ganks will be problematic, because the highly active laning phase plays a large role in why deadlock is so fun imo changing how souls are shared is probably the best way to tackle this

[@DizzyFi]

@@fullsoul5727 that is where my opinion differs, to me laning phase feels like the gathering power stage, and honestly feels like it is too punishing to losing players imo. I prefer longer games because there’s more potential for interaction and cool moments. When I win the lane and then the game is a stomp and over, it feels like I basically wasted my time because there’s no challenge in it. While I do think the map could be slightly larger or require more movement, the soul sharing mechanic is the thing that I agree does need changes. Probably something along the lines of “souls are shared equally in laning phase instead of duplicated if the if the player has not been in soul sharing range for at least 20sec in 1min.” Fixes laning stop age lane funneling by making them have to stick with their laner if they want to get the effect, while still technically allowing for some form of it and time to take jg.

[@sepachortels6366]

@@fullsoul5727no problem

[@PrivateTRE]

im pretty sure all souls are duplicated with a max of 2, more than 2 and the original killer gets 50%, and the others get 25%

[@alliu6562]

*exactly* this is the phase where the game is the most flexible, and feedback is CRUCIAL for valve right now to make a better game

[@avocol4589]

dont forget you can signal to them in the forums, they've been listening

[@rogerzhang5993]

Icefrog will come up with a solution

[@RishiJParmar]

@@rogerzhang5993 All hail the mighty frog.

[@butlazgazempropan-butan11k87]

"this is just an alpha, why are you complaining" MY BROTHER IN CHRIST THATS THE WHOLE POINT OF AN ALPHA

[@appleseed445]

Quite literally lol

[@Llamanator_]

You know shit is serious when you hear the runescape bgm

[@EclairTw]

Both mid lanes are duo lanes with shared xp. Both side lanes are solo lanes, sharing xp in the side lanes results in souls split as if it is 10 minutes.

[@kylektkt9695]

actually best answer right here

[@dodee312]

that actually sounds like it’ll work

[@scottkim1646]

I think a combination of this and increasing the distance between the lanes to punish early game ganking without eliminating it completely.

[@henrydot6898]

This also limits roaming to the solo lanes though since you get less soals as a duo.

[@scottkim1646]

There's going to be some y = f(x), where x = distance between the lanes, and y = value of roaming between lanes / value of staying in lanes from a balancing perspective. The downside of making your lane outmatched (whether that's to higher likelihood of deaths, faster damage to guardian, or maybe an included element of first blood having greater rewards will increase will increasing distance I'd imagine. Also just simply making the value of souls in lane a finite amount (instead of doubling it) could also lead to duo lanes naturally getting less resources than solo lanes, the same way support players get less in MOBAs, forcing the team to think strategically about the carries.

[@broomhatter3877]

Increase turret damage done to minions so that if you notice your opponents doing this than you can just push lane hard and have the turret kill minions before the person is able to rotate.

[@maniacpwnageking]

Every idea I've seen in here is pretty bad, but I can't see any game breaking issues with this one yet.

[@M.L.official]

I do agree that turrets fold like paper to minions in this game. I think they need to be stronger especially against minions, and especially the turrets in the base. It's actually inconsequential.

[@H4MM-R]

​@@maniacpwnagekingagreed. Most solutions in here try to solve the issue directly in a clunky way that add unnecessary complexity to the game's systems. This, at least, adds potential counterplay elegantly by using the mechanics that are already in the game.

[@Guadeloop]

I like this

[@Yutani_Crayven]

The opposite should be the case, if anything. If a person leaves lane, then his lane opponent has free push on the guardian. If you kill troopers faster, then this free push advantage gets negated.

[@link_x2979]

maybe 'excess' creep score should give you unsecured souls, so that you have a bounty of sorts

[@resevil2396]

But if they dont stay in lane long enough to fight it becomes almost impossible to take them out and makes slow moving heros a liability. Its still too easy to snowball that way. He hit the shop several times during the run so unless you could only use unsecuried by going back to base thats still not really gonna help much.

[@link_x2979]

@@resevil2396 that's true. Unsecured souls go away quick when you're buying 500's. For my comment to be the solution the unsecured souls system would need to change

[@SpaceBroGabe]

I'm for this idea for them to try first. Unsecured souls are already a mechanic and it would provide a positive heuristic rather than an invisible negative one like reducing soul value after a certain threshold. So something like, you can only process around 600 or whatever souls a minute, then past that threshold they become unsecured and clear over time at whatever that rate is. Maybe a change that could help this further is that unsecured souls can only be used to purchase items if you're in base and not at the shops in lane. A visual change to the shops where you can and cannot use unsecured souls would help further reinforce this concept.

[@t900HAWK]

My soul hungry ass has been doing this for a minute now good to know it wasn’t in vain

[@89xixsem89]

Locking souls behind lanes is a bad idea for another reason: Sometimes the game assigns a straight up counter to your character in your lane, making it so you can switch with your friends or teammates. For example, a shotgun hero against a sniper is gonna have a hard time in the first laning phase. This could not be the case for high mmr or very skilled players, but a game-wide change like that would affect everyone else.

[@GetterRay]

The 3 shotgun heroes in the game are not hard countered by any of the sniper characters in the game due to other factors than gun range.

[@ZetaPrime9699]

Shotgun users are currently the ones with the easiest time laning - they tend to be tankier (easier to melee for guaranteed soul secure) and much easier to deny with. Squishy carries may have an easier time poking but they have a much harder time winning the souls race - if I'm playing Infernus or Haze or whatnot I'd much rather lane against a Vindicta or Seven or other carry

[@GREG_WHEREISTHEMAYO]

The solution mentioned in the video seems to solve this

[@HerbaceousM8]

we should be able to move in the pregame and pick a lane then

[@Xeconis]

I think the lane assignments are an alpha version thing that will go away later when there's more polish

[@Midaspl]

My idea would be that until 10th minute each minion has a hidden tag of a wave it spawned at. At a given wave you can get souls only from the amount of creeps it spawned. For example, if wave 2 had 5 creeps, you can get souls from creeps that spawned on wave 2 only 5 times on all lanes. That way if you rotate perfectly you don't lose any souls, but you don't gain any either.

[@travisisaac6760]

probably the best solution ive seen. that would also allow a lane that is getting denied a lot to have a chance to secure the same souls by roaming

[@chipndip1830]

I was just about to comment the same idea here after someone in the discord mentioned a similar concept. This method doesn't have the same issue that a hard soul cap has. For example if you were in a solo lane and left the lane long enough that multiple waves of enemy creep built up in your lane, when you return to clear them all you may end up reaching the soul cap. By instead counting how many individual creeps you can kill every wave you can avoid this issue while still limiting double soaking. The cap on how many creeps you can kill wouldn't necessarily have to be only 1 waves worth, it could be slightly higher to account for rotating naturally and then you experience diminishing returns, but not high enough to make it worth double soaking.

[@GREG_WHEREISTHEMAYO]

I like this idea, but increasing it to 6 would feel better for players who go to a different lane to shove forward

[@sepachortels6366]

Hidden mechanics are nit good

[@vzoryan1769]

seems like a great idea, needs a small change though: after the cap of 5 creeps is reached, you still get souls but much less as Deathly suggested, to have a certain trade-off between soul leeching and staying in your lane also it would be less hurtful to rotation incentive

[@YanniNicolaides]

the way to counter this is for the enemy to completely punish the rotating lane by pushing the land the the objective. the obj in this game are really good

[@grayve2122]

Honestly i feel like the way out is to literally just make exp share normally. This just feels like a funneling strategy, and those usually have a very short life span whenever they pop up

[@Dozer456123]

how do you balance duo vs single lanes then? Singles would get fed comparatively.

[@SafetyKitten]

@@Dozer456123 thats usually how moba games work

[@ynybody1382]

​@@Dozer456123 Would double the creeps in duo lanes with unshared souls be a potential solution? Only concern is what happens if one person eats them all, would make balance a nightmare.

[@Dozer456123]

@@ynybody1382 It also just changes the games tempo a lot, but yea it would. Duo lane with regular creeps is already a lot to manage. Maybe if they made the lane a little bigger?

[@weasyll_]

The only other solution I could think of is to make creeps have less health and/or deal more damage, so the duo lane could hard shove the solo you're leaving so you miss a wave and take tower damage. You would probably also have to speed up wave timers and decrease souls of creeps to make up for more being cleared.

[@M.L.official]

It's so funny coz I suggested making minions have more health/resistance but the problem is heroes with bad waveclear get hurt even more. Alternatively, maybe introduce that you need to be reasonably close to the minions in order to gain the soul it drops. For example if you clear a wave like 30 meters away from you, you don't get the soul from it just like how in league you don't get xp from minions that are not in range.

[@aidenchristiansen5776]

​@@M.L.officialthat would also hurt a lot of the long range characters like vindicta or grandma

[@DT-hb3zu]

​@@aidenchristiansen5776grandma? You talking about geist?

[@aidenchristiansen5776]

@@DT-hb3zu grey talon

[@DT-hb3zu]

@@aidenchristiansen5776 you know that's a guy, right?

[@pempsiman]

We saw this in the very early stages of League of Legends. The meta used to be 2 duo lanes and 1 mid until a ganker role was established and evolved into the jungle role we see today. I understand why it might not work for deadlock, but if you can't beat them, join them. If both teams start running a pure ganker role, it becomes an individual skill in your ability to understand gank timings. This would raise many issues in deadlock since the guardians don't provide as much protection as they do in other MOBAs, so I would consider buffing the towers to some extent. As I'm writing this, I'm also not sure I want a role in such a free-form game as Deadlock to where people are restricted to roles because then it turns into OW or Smite, and those games went downhill really fast when those metas were enforced by the community.

[@Delouser69]

Correct

[@TheInnsanity]

One solution that could solve this and some other minor problems, is making some portion of the souls gained by players passive, this makes any current and newly found soul gaining cheese strat a bit worse, and makes a few in-game situations marginally less frustrating. (Who hasn't been 2 souls short of an item at one time or another) Another could be causing some sort of slowing affect in the (concrete) jungle zones in the first few minutes of the game, possibly just until the neutral mobs spawn, or even just have that part of the map be "under construction" for the first bit, and lanes slowly expand out from the ziplines as the game progresses into the later stages. Could possibly use those zappy towers as deterents as well. The strategy is much worse if you have to zipline in and out of the lanes, especially with how long the expedited zipline cooldown is, could even make it so using ziplines other than your own is slowed/ disabled to further incentivize sticking to your lane (maybe the zipline cooldown counteracts this slowdown.) I definitely think hard capping souls from troopers is a bad idea (if applied to more than the first few minutes) as it makes the gameplay pattern of choosing to farm a crashing wave worse in the late game, and could lead to play patterns of instead intentionally delaying your own troopers to trigger this happening to your opponent under normal circumstances. Borrowing ideas from other games: You could make it so the color of the lane matters, maybe make two of the lanes explicitly not have full sharing during the first 10 minutes. For example, maybe green lane is a "solo lane" and any souls collected in this lane are actually only shared at 65%, making it so if there are two players on a team, you only get 130% of the total souls instead of 200%. Maybe you get a bonus if over 80% of your souls are from the same lane during the first 10 minutes, could call it a color purity bonus or something, so if you gank other lanes 2-3 times, you won't lose any bonuses, but if you're splitting lanes 50/50, the patron yells at you for tainting the supply and for the rest of the laning phase you get a reduction to rewards gained (until you reach that threshold again) Could make minion waves less tanky for the first few minutes, and they get stronger as you get towards the 10 minute mark. If the towers killed the first 5 waves of minions in half a second instead of taking 5-6 seconds, the counterplay to this strategy could be just to push fast, and know that if the minions reached the enemy guardian, they'd die instantly, denying the runner all of the souls. (this solution would also prevent guardians from going down too fast to other cheese strategies)

[@fragasm726]

I think this basically creates a sort of psuedo-jungle position that kind of ruins the laning phase of the game

[@blood81hd33]

This mechanic is also an example of how oppressive ganking is in this game and the fact that rotations are very quick. A solution to this would be to just have rotations take longer, but in order to do that they'd either need to completely alter the stamina system (and thus make it less fun) or completely change the map.

[@fufu1405]

Honestly, the map does feel small sometimes. I can be in the other lane in what feels like a couple seconds.

[@rexe30k]

i think making the lane the same to the traditional moba is an idea, 3 lanes, vast jungle, 4/5 players.

[@JustDrewski]

Low key just need wards

[@normally6785]

total map changes maybe are why the game is alpha

[@dr.lemonpie1904]

I think fast rotations and that ganking it's strong it's ok, it makes the game fun and a lot less still compares to the conventional moba formula where lanes are so still and kinda boring

[@Dudemanguybrojoe]

They could also change the jungle camps to be the more abundant and/or risk-averse option while keeping this strategy as a "risky" option. I'm unsure what exactly the revamped jungle camps would be, however. Maybe they change throughout the game.

[@ShrtStfflp]

Capping the Souls per minute comes with other issues. main one being since there is now a soft cap if one team does get ahead it makes coming back extremely difficult. I'd say it makes ganking even more viable than it currently is. you get a pick or force a player back then just keep up your farming to that limit then they have absolutely no counter play. the best they can do on an individual level is not let the gap get any wider. on a team level it just means your team needs to gank as well. the only solution I can think of for that problem is to get rid of the cap at a certain time, like at 10 minutes or so. Personally I don't see a perfect solution for this type of problem, but my idea would be A) get rid of the 100% sharing. B) have small camps and boxes spawn earlier. C) make small camps worth more but scale worse as the game goes on. this type of solution will create a jungler type role, which i actually do not like the idea of for this game as it keeps the same problem of ganking being really strong. I honestly think this is more of a mindset issue than it is a mechanics issue but we will see how this all plays out as valve continues to test things.

[@Zackreaver]

I think the point was that the cap was only relevant for the first 10 minutes, because after the first 10 minutes, souls get divided based on hero count (And denies count as full denies) The only reason this really exists is so that solo and duo lanes get power spikes at the exact same amount of trooper kills in lane. Which is an interaction the dev's want, but players discovered this mechanic and found a way to exploit it for extra souls. The solution is to specifically go after the exploit that is benefiting from it and nerf it in a way that won't affect people playing in the lanes normally. You would still get hero, neutral, and crate soul's normally and unaffected, this is specifically just trooper souls that you would only get faster by rotating between lanes in the first 10 minutes.

[@colbyboucher6391]

I figure an unspoken aspect of the idea would be for the cap to be very high, and for it to increase as the game moves on past the laning phase. This specific strat gets you souls *significantly* more quickly than other methods including farming your jungle camps efficiently. What you're worried about is only true if you honestly think that comebacks are impossible _without_ using this specific strategy (it should be pretty clear that that's not the case)

[@skyfuller7535]

@@ShrtStfflp I think two things, I agree that all cap ideas seem problematic and unessecary. I think there is certainty one current issue which is there are large skill discrepancies in the game allowing for this strategy. Also, I think character selection for the 2v2 lane could also be useful. My guess is there is a player sided solution to this problem.

[@notwilsy]

I don't like the idea of an invisible soul per minute cap because it won't be intuitive. Perhaps if soul sharing with a teammate was instead a buff that kicked in only after spending an x amount (15 maybe?) seconds close (25 meters?) to that teammate and decays if you are separated, until it expires where the souls are then only given to the person who secures it, and soul-sharing will only return after the buff is re-established by staying in range of that teammate for the charge up time. The buff can be visualised as a tether between you and you're lane partner similar to Ivy's 2, and the side status bar. The visualisation could even be used past the 10 minute mark to indicate who you're sharing souls with but maybe with a different colour to show that you both no longer get full value.

[@kaloiano1]

I really like this.

[@faa-]

this good

[@glaukko3]

good idea

[@anormalguy8407]

That sounds terrible late game and like the guy mentioned in the video even if the souls had their value reduced to 20% after you get your own full lane it would desensitise ganking lanes

[@illfreak821]

a LOT of hidden mechanics in mobas arent intuitive but they have to be there cuz the game wouldnt work without them

[@Lortelars200]

Had no idea how effective a playstyle like this is, like I can see it being just a strat in the game since nothing really prevents the enemy team from doing the same thing but it is rather wild how far ahead you can get by doing this compared to the rest of the team so yeah a change do seem to be needed.

[@enso8762]

I've been doing this since I started playing when I learned about how souls are shared😅 I think the diminishing returns idea is nice, that could also prevent snowballing... the problem is that it's a strategy, I think they should just make it harder to rotate or more dangerous like maybe blocking some areas in the first few minutes or until a nearby guardian falls so the roamer needs to go back a long way...

[@anteater2132]

the only thing i would change about this strat is make any souls you get outside your lane from troopers before 10mins unsecure souls

[@TatharNuar]

I love the implication that Ivy can be a jungler in a game without junglers

[@skyr333]

dota 2 did that too and kill it

[@MrRafagigapr]

being good at jungling and being a dedicated jungler only are 2 different things , i do think having a good jungler in your team that scales a lot while taking safer farm is a good idea anyway

[@Minecrafanatic123]

G​@@MrRafagigapr

[@tylerkarnes2947]

Claiming there is no “jungler” in this game is a discredit to haze, seven, some M&K builds, and Ivy

[@MrRafagigapr]

@@tylerkarnes2947 there are no dedicated junglers intentionally , being good at jungling is different from begin pve mode and going to lanes likei n league ,icefrog hated this in dota 2 and removed it

[@KevinCarlino]

They could make trooper waves spawn faster so it's not worth doing this to double-up on farm, but still worth rotating when rotating is the play (and not miss out on lane farm by limiting positioning).

[@maxtyzzler7666]

Make it so solo lane souls split while duo lanes duplicate but only for 2 players if any more are added it goes from let’s say 50 base souls with the 2 players each getting 50 but once there’s another player it begins to split to 33.33~ so overall still the same amount of souls for the team

[@BrianL57]

Thank you for talking about this and bringing up possible solutions. Also loving the Facecam

[@bharadwajparameswaran6237]

Reward early ganks more, like in Dota. First blood and so on. Basically adjust the risk/benefit of dying/soaking. This can still be a skill based mechanic as long as the enemy team has the game+map knowledge to punish this. Having said that, this still is a cheese strat (another dota reference incoming: like sub 15min deathpush with Nature's prophet and Drow or level 1 Roshan with Ursa etc). I feel like knowing that this works and knowing how to abuse this is a skill in itself. The game just needs to punish folks that cant do it perfectly. Reward ganks more. This makes the static laning phase more active and makes the game more fun to watch. Spectators prefer to watch fights/ganks versus a hero just last hitting creeps (although i love watching someone perfect every creep in a wave, but that's just me).

[@goodthanksbro]

Deaths absolutely need to have more weight, you can pump someone in lane and it not really mean much

[@MuteLunatic]

My idea to fix. When you get the buff on a zipline from riding it for 2 seconds you also then activate the double souls for that lane. So you can swap lanes by riding the zip into it but you can't just run back and forth between lanes.

[@jpjpjpppjp]

I have seen this over the last week on my matches and it is rly unfun to play against. It doesn't even need to be a duo late partner rotating to a solo lane. You can get a friend that is also on a solo lane, leave one lane empty and just push 2v1 lane as fast as possible and then rotate both heroes into the empty lane to farm the creeps that are now taking damage from your tower. The damage the enemy does to the tower is marginal even if they try to push the lane fast and since the tower does very little damage to the creeps, you miss only a few of them.

[@iliakatster]

There was a similar strategy in league called gold funnelling where the jungler would farm the jungle camps and in mid there was a support who wasn't meant to win the lane but just keep as many minions alive as possible so that the jungler could go and farm them uncontested in a brief 2v1 lane. It created an unstoppable fed carry and was incredibly hard to counter bc it required coordinating the whole team to proactively track and harass the jungler to stop it. Tbey ended up stopping it by making it so a jungler who was far ahead would get less gold from lane minions.

[@wurlds3l]

I think the best way would be for some sort of ramp up time before you would get the max value from lane souls, like around a minute that you have to be in 'green' lane. Souls gained from kills would still count for 100%.

[@M.L.official]

Yea that's interesting

[@williamgrimmer1031]

They did a similar version of the solution you suggested in smite, it quite literally killed the game on the spot.

[@ethanmann2457]

Wait can somebody tell me what the “not KZbin friendly term” is for “double leaching”?

[@petertran7360]

starts with S

[@weee8e7ee8]

he said it somewhere in the video

[@danielgrizzlus3950]

@@petertran7360 Stop being fucking cowards and just say it JFC

[@Rumplenutskn]

soaking

[@Izunundara]

​@@Rumplenutskn there's NO FUCKING WAY soaking is a censored word what the shit

[@bleydhammond2056]

This was an excellent video, straight and concise, to the point, very respectful. In hopes of helping have this sorted out, I’ll begin implementing this into as many of my own games as possible so hopefully we can bring awareness to the issue just a little more to the forefront

[@Deathy]

How would you guys fix this problem? I'm genuinely curious to hear everyone's thoughts, as it's actually a pretty difficult issue to solve from a design perspective. Let me know!

[@nick.3733]

The best solution is just no shared souls between lanes. If you dont have lane prio you should lose souls for leaving lane.

[@NineConsonants]

@@nick.3733 That shuts down roaming to gank, or leaving your lane once your/their tower is killed, which I think are good and important aspects of the game.

[@Jaegerminor]

Limit the amount of creeps a player can earn souls from to 4 for each wave in the first 10 minutes of the game. Simple enough to implement. Give every player a 3 bit counter per wave for the first 20 waves. Assign each creep that spawns to a wave. Every creep you get credit for increment the counter, once it reaches 4 don't give credit. If you stay in your lane you won't notice a change, if you roam between lanes without double soaking you won't notice a difference. If you pack the data thats 90 bytes of extra data per match, i.e. nothing even if you don't you can just use a uint8_t per player per wave and its 240 bytes per game, still nothing. You could still technically benefit if you had missed a CS or from extra denies by roaming but that's so niche I don't think it'd be worthwhile. I think this would end the cheese, is cheap & easy to implement and will be unnoticable for normal play, even if a bit of an odd mechanic.

[@cokewtf]

Like with any moba, the amount of gold/souls etc. resource is split between the players in proximity. Solo lanes get more. Duo lanes get less. The current system seems like an oversight.

[@Snopeeh]

Maybe have mid lanes have soul share but the off-side lanes dont (meaning only 2 share and the other 2 dont) that way you can still roam and get the creeps if your laner dies, but rotating for sharing loses its meaning. this also works in conjunction with the fact that 2 lanes are meant to be 2v2 while the others are just 1v1s.

[@D_scxnnect]

locking people into earning souls in their spawn lane means there is no lane swapping into character counter picks. if this is done, it needs to occur after X amount of game time passed where people have slotted into the lanes they want but i dont think this is a good idea at all. it will restrict future characters and playstyles will be limited. one day there's gonna be a lane picker and character ban system, i assume, so again, not the best fix since it limits the future. i'd personally like the map to expand horizontally and give players the ability to earn/gain vision (like wards from league) to counteract roams. if youre trying to call missing on a character in lane, youre gonna say it so often people will lose their minds and the enemy will fake roams to bait people to leave lane when they shouldn't (sounds like a really cool idea but hiding behind a wall for 10s waiting for someone to rotate isnt fun to play or watch). maybe the tunnels need to be the only possible path to roam until X time has passed and some sort of barrier prevents easily moving y>g>b>p. these changes arent negative at all and gives the game meaningful lane trades/farming where your time needs to be spent efficiently or you fall behind. punishing players economy for farming well in lane isn't a solution either. imho that would be the worst change. guardians need to have turret plates (seen in league) or reduced taken damage until X time passed to stop the lane changing drastically after 0 time passed - which also adds to the roaming/vision issues. they dont deal enough damage to characters either alternating wave times for outer lanes and inner lanes is a good change. it means roams are for kills, not funnelling CS and could lead to 3v3 skirmishes in early/mid game. would be great to play and watch

[@Great_Day_]

My suggestion is that before 10 minutes in order to split souls in a lane, you need to have touched the zip line in that lane last. This way you don’t eliminate the strategy completely and people can still rotate, but it will take a lot longer by forcing you back to the zip if you want the extra souls.

[@DT-hb3zu]

Zip is pretty close though

[@PL-zh7cv]

yeah zip is too close anyway

[@danielgrizzlus3950]

The problem stems from the xp sharing which is strange in the first place. Maybe have 2 lanes dedicated to getting double the creep wave size, but the players get half the xp of surrounding creeps killed, just like after minute 10. It was interesting how they tried to avoid the problem that's in Dota, where the mid laner gets more 'souls', but their current solution to it causes this exact problem.

[@Mad_Rowdy_]

Taking from other ideas around plus adding my own: 1.) souls you get from a lane that doesn't match your own are gained as unsecured souls 2.) If there more laners in a lane than there should be in lane, the people who don't match the lane gain soul as if it was split, those who match the lane gain souls as if it was duplicated(normal behavior). 3) If you gain souls from 2 consecutive waves in the same lane, without gaining souls in another lane in-between, you will be switched to that lane if it not your current lane and there aren't too many laners present for said. These rules are intended to: A) provide more risk to double dipping with only a small risk to swapping. B) provide less benefit to double dipping without punishing people playing normally. C) Preserve the ability for players pto swap lanes to mixup Lane mid-laning phase (think of cases in dota where the side lanes would swap or a support would hold mid while mid roams/jungles)

[@DT-hb3zu]

That would make lane switches in the beginning moot. We often play as a 6 stack, and if we're matched poorly, we switch lanes.

[@clocked0]

​​@@DT-hb3zuI think you misunderstood, the idea is that if there are 3 people in a lane, the extra person only gets 1/3 of the souls. If there are only 2 as normal, they get duplicated as normal. It wouldn't have any impact on people swapping lanes for better matchups.

[@DT-hb3zu]

@@clocked0 ohh, I thought you suggested that people have to stay in the lane they were assigned

[@M.L.official]

Was gonna suggest making minions a bit stronger in lane but that kind of screws heroes with bad waveclear even more. Maybe increase minions' spirit resist

[@4rrrrrrgh]

It's easy: before the 10 minute mark, each player has a cap on the souls they can gain via lane creeps equal to the soul value of the total number of enemy lane creeps spawned per-lane so far in the game. Thus, the cap increases each time a wave spawns, or at a similar interval.

[@Kanudee]

This and give like 50% diminishing return from other lanes creeps only if you go over your farm cap that would be unsecured souls so you can still do the strategy and it will have a counter if you misplay

[@8r33]

This makes the most sense

[@jam227]

The simplest way is to either halve the souls share, or delay the soul share to take 30-60 seconds upon rotation so that the main positive is the additional pressure onto that solo lane, with any additional soak being to stop the rotating player from falling behind too hard

[@rthypoo]

The real lesson is to enjoy deadlock before the fun gets optimised out of it!

[@trentward2725]

You think people aren’t optimizing now? There’s current optimizations and potential optimization. Good players are always going to play optimally.

[@DigiDuoo]

This has been a known strategy since before the NDA was lifted

[@CrystallineLore]

@@trentward2725 Only at the highest upper end. I t takes a while before mid to low tier players just blindly parrot them, unwittingly contributing to the problem.

[@CrystallineLore]

@@DigiDuoo Not widely though.

[@sepachortels6366]

@@DigiDuoowrong

[@andriodmanitee]

What is the other term for double leaching called?

[@Refrodnalf]

The diminished souls idea is probably best implemented where each set of waves has a unique ID, if you get more than 1 wave's worth of troopers that all share the same ID then you start to get very little souls for each trooper over the usual (and probably disable this system at 10min). This way you can gank and still get full souls from a wave if you are missing your own wave, but you can't get 2 waves every cycle, only one wave and a very small extra. my worry would be that at the top level, that very small extra could still enough to make it worth doing, and pubs will just copy because its what they see the pros doing.

[@Fordddyyy]

This was my first thought

[@devol3829]

Wouldnt do sht, they would just swap to permaganking. Ganking needs to be made harder, the slow you get after being hit is just too massive.

[@Refrodnalf]

"Wouldnt do sht" "they would do something different" do you read the words you are typing

[@Ang3lUki]

THIS is the exact time to be providing Valve with this kind of feedback

[@zteeek]

I agree this is a problem and it has to be changed. But I believe the way to fix this is just to share all souls (not duplicate) with your lane partner. So yes, this means duo lanes are behind compared to solo lanes, but this works in League of Legends so idk why it wouldn't work here(?)

[@zteeek]

just to add, I don't like capping the amount of souls you can get once you are already ahead, this defeats the purpose of a MOBA. If you're better than your opponent then you should have the option to keep snowballing ahead.

[@omristeiner6285]

I don't play LoL, but in Dota it's different than Deadlock because one hero farms (gets 100% of gold, theoretically), but both get EXP. In Deadlock EXP and gold are coupled, so falling behind solo laners is more significant.

[@viooni7378]

Ganking and snowballing is so easy in Deadlock... Doing what you said would mean that if Vindicta had a good solo lane and got to 3k(ult) souls fast, then she can literally farm heroes from duo lane (with

[@drewpeacock9087]

It's so much more punishing than in LoL, the carry still gets gold just not exp. In deadlock 4/6 players just get screwed. This would probably result in a 4 solo lane meta with 2 perma roamers, who take over the lanes once a laner is able to transition to full jungle. Basically I think you completely ruin a great part of the game (duo lanes existing) just to not even stabilise the lanes and make the game less fun. I think it's an awful idea.

[@takingday]

1. Slightly increasing the length or make the pathing a little bit more windy between lanes maybe even make sprint take 10-20% longer to ramp up to max sprint so it takes a little longer to rotate so it's easier for the enemy to capitalize on you leaving and you have a shorter time to capitalize on getting both lanes souls. 2. increase minion damage to each other a bit so that when their is more minions on one side they will push through allot faster to the guardian. 3. make the guardian do a bit more ramping damage the longer they hit something (this also makes the timing harder for last hitting as the damage is not always consistent ) so that it's likely that the teammate you left behind will have a harder time securing kills on minions with the guardian melting them down leaving it more likely that souls are lost instead of gained from your early lane rotate. (reducing minion health might achieve some of this too but leave it too easy for decent waveclear heros to push even harder than they do now.)

[@skoodlemoose]

the way to fix this btw is to make the travel times between lanes much longer, probably by making the map wider. The fact that you can jump between lanes in only a couple of seconds is absurd. In games like league it takes at least 20 seconds to walk up to another lane and it's a big commitment that you have to make, and if you're wrong about the decision you get punished hard.

[@ufuk5872]

You tp one side of the map to the other in dota via gates and tp. This is just normal for dota player.

[@RichHeart89]

@@ufuk5872 it still costs you the TP, or mana if you use the portal and usually you don't just insta jump the enemies but you kinda need to be a bit sneaky about the rotations or it becomes a waste. In Deadlock stamina comes back so fast it doesn't even matter that you use it for traveling instead of actually attacking or escaping. Yeah ganking in Dota is faster than ever nowadays but it still is a commitment instead of just a mindless farming rotation

[@drewpeacock9087]

​@@ufuk5872not really though as there are zero counter tps, you are completely stranded once you are ganked. Plus there is no downtime or real cost(gold, cd, mana) like there is rotating in Dota, in fact you turbofarm by doing so.

[@LeebeeLink]

this is connected to the issue but honestly I'd like to see the map spread out like 10%ish or so more just to make ganking, rotations, and stuff like this more committal. come midgame the mobility heroes can basically be wherever they want without much opportunity cost and it feels like the game could benefit from it

[@masaki8049]

How about removing the soul duplication mechanic entirely (so souls are always shared equally at all times, not just after 10 mins), but also making duo lane creeps give double the souls until the 10 min mark? Do you think this would introduce other problems?

[@j.b.dandrea3467]

You could then potentially stack soul on two players by having them play solo in a duo lane.

[@jkljosh7392]

That means another player would be losing out on souls tho ​@j.b.dandrea3467

[@remarkablewave3451]

This is a problem with league of legends xp where its shaired between nerby players the problem is it increases toxicisity because no one wants to lose souls/xp because someone else rotates to their lane.

[@drewpeacock9087]

Pros would absolutely trade some souls on a support char to get a snowball hero rolling ​@@jkljosh7392

[@SilverKeyKeeper]

this is abuseable but its a pretty easy implementation, Deadlocks items makes it a bit more elegant because having 6 500 souls items is way stronger than any 3k item, very few heros can survive without resources unlike other mobas. it could be used to make one person insanely fed while keeping another weak but that's honestly fine since a focusing a carry isn't hugely difficult

[@MrSam1804]

Solution: you get x2 only per wave, if you cleared your wave and go to another lane, you will be deprived from getting x2. Also your "extra" souls can be unsecured. Since all the waves are countable its pretty easy to implement this mechanic. you might even get a debuff that shows your x2 is used up till the other wave arrives.

[@NoshuHyena]

The thing I like about Heroes of the Storm is that it has a huge amount of freedom in roaming and lane rotation, because your one resource is totally shared among your whole team (you only need 1 player per lane to soak up XP). I think Deadlock would benefit from this kind of roaming freedom, but not if it gives an effortless advantage like how it works currently. To solve the problem, I would love to see souls be shared just like in HotS prior to the 10 minute mark, but as soon as 10 min hits, souls become individualized like they are now. This would also solve a common pain point of MOBAs where if you lose a lane duel a couple times (or sometimes just once), you basically forfeit the right to have fun for rest of the laning phase. If souls are shared in the early game, you don't have to worry about a single player getting super fed, either through stomping their lane or double leeching, and you can continue having fun until the laning phase ends.

[@Matt-fm4vr]

Except laning well is a key part of mobas. I don't want my lane souls given to the 0-3 pocket so I have less ability to carry him later.

[@NoshuHyena]

@@Matt-fm4vr Laning well contributes to your team's overall power. If your Pocket on the other side of the map is 0-3, you have the ability to carry him *now* by going 3-0 and keeping your team 's power level up.

[@Matt-fm4vr]

@@NoshuHyena that's how it works currently. If I go 3-0 I keep the souls and am in a better place to carry the feeder.

[@NoshuHyena]

@@Matt-fm4vr Yeah it does work that way now. The principle is the same in both. When you play well, your team is closer to winning. Whether the souls go to you or everyone, your performance still has an impact on your team's success.

[@Matt-fm4vr]

@@NoshuHyena except it's better to have souls on one player than everyone. It's also more fun to reap the benefits personally for laning well. Why bother capping it at 10 mins? Let's share exp and gold all game because it's fair. Just park 3 people in sidelanes while your team 3v3s coinflips the game mid.

[@OCIBj]

the thumbnail of this videos is so satisfying! it would go even harder if the souls on the foreground popped in front of the white frame I believe

[@SoftBeverage]

since the lanes are color coordinated they could make it that the shared souls are only shared with players who have been in your color coordinated lane for at least "X" amount of seconds? only thing i can think of.

[@fedweezy4976]

Only issue is that if you get matched in a lane against a hero that is really good in lane against your hero and there's nothing you can do. Right now you can swap with someone but with a change like you are suggesting it would mean no swapping unless they made it an official thing you could do in the pre match lobby.

[@SoftBeverage]

Let’s say your originally starting in green lane but have to move to purple lane because of a hard counter. After x amount of seconds (we’ll say 10 seconds) your color will change to that lane and you be able to take farm from that lane until you go to a different lane which will make your color change again if you stay in another lane for x Amount of seconds.

[@SoftBeverage]

Or they could make it so that you only get a fraction of other colored lanes souls if you haven’t been in that lane for more than like 30 seconds

[@ZimpotchiTV]

Great Video, i had wondered why people were rotating so often / and jumping into my lanes, took me a bit to get into the higher "mmr" games, but after 100 matches and my winrate was at 80%, i started to get into these chad games with lashes always roating / infernus always rotating and getting super ahead in farm, it all makes sense now.

[@Varonna]

"They lost because of this strat trust me theyre very good players" also Dynamo at 5:10

[@Kanudee]

I mean bro died to minions when he had minions right next to him and enemy to contest him. Every one greeds and makes dumb mistakes

[@justindeane1512]

I really like the idea you mentioned about the diminishing returns for instance in league of legends because support items can be so powerful if you have one build and you reach a certain creep score threshold you begin to get less and less gold from minions you kill until your team can catch up to your gold per minute. Although this game is very new seeing strategies like this is not uncommon. I really hope this game has a bright future and videos like this need to exist for that reason.

[@Timeistheuniverse]

I think that they need to unlink souls from counting as both xp and gold and then they can have soul splitting occur at the start of the game. That will also allow heroes to slot into a support role better. I think its weird that duo lanes can get more souls than solo lanes because 2 people can secure and deny more than a solo. The solo lane should have more xp but the same amount of gold as a duo lane.

[@SuuBrainrot]

Another issue this current soul soak meta causes is a significant gap in pro and casual play While it's always cool to have coordinated teams pull off strategic plays that you won't see in casual play, I feel like something this dominating to the early economy metagame require this much team coordination will just be really harmful for the large casual/solo queue playerbase. Deadlock's character kits not having clearly defined roles (i.e. Dynamo is supportive BUT he has enough stuff like waveclear and decent gun damage to keep him afloat standalone, etc.) allows a nice flexible solo queue experience but something like this would require 2 players in a lane to have a clear anchor position while the third would need to be a speedy roamer that'll absorb the most souls. AKA we're back to traditional moba carry roles that everyone's gonna want to play

[@skyfuller7535]

I think it makes sense for souls to be split between everyone nearby instead of everyone getting full value. This would slow the pace of the game, cause bigger disparities between solo and duo lanes, and increase the relevance of jungling by a lot.

[@FOGSHIE]

What if duo lanes had more creep in each wave to balance the splitting of the souls?

[@skyfuller7535]

@@FOGSHIE I’m not a huge fan of that since it subliminally forces which lanes will be the duo lanes. I’d prefer that option remains in the hands of the players. Reworking creeps and towers could definetly be an answer like having higher tower damage, or faster moving creeps or something.

[@MrSzoSs]

this is why the game is in alpha state, we are playtesting it. There will be much more issues to address and it should be our priority as a community to make sure the game goes in the right direction. I just around 100 hours in began to understand the thought behind the way the map is designed, it didn't occur to me that you could cheese like that although it was always strange to me in duo lanes why we both get the same souls. The threshold on souls sounds like good idea or threshold on troopers killed like you can only kill 4 troppers every wave spawn since jgl don't spawn until 7min anyways or just simply getting less souls for a different lane in the first 10mins

[@Haps_q]

Most gamers tend to forget this: its not your job to suggest solutions, its your job to point out the problem. Its the developers job to come up with a solution. Gj on trying to explain what the problem is, there is some great points -no propper counters, boring to play against, boring to do, blocks individual skill. Its definetly something that needs developer attention.

[@godlyvex5543]

It's not his job to do shit (other than make videos). He can suggest whatever he wants.

[@Haps_q]

@@godlyvex5543 mate, its literally a playtest.

[@cerulean5032]

@@godlyvex5543 No, but players are historically pretty terrible at game design, and often times come up with pretty horrendous ideas. So to save everybody's time, it's usually better for gamers to just point out an issue, maybe also why the issue is an issue, and the let the developers handle how to solve the issue.

[@burndly]

gamers want faster horses when they really mean they want a car

[@impyrobot]

@@cerulean5032we can suggest whatever we want but it's up to the Devs to decide on implement a solution only if they think it's a problem

[@gg_flingyflongynooberino8593]

just increase creep to creep damage (or just creep damage) and move speed, this makes it easier to punish a lane when there is a hero dissadvantage as they would take more creep damage faster or have to sac their tower. another solution is that the portion of souls that can be denied represents the lane balance unless a lane partner is dead, meaning that if only 1 of you is present in the lane 75% of your creep can be denied and you get 25% as the instant reward. the strat doesnt need to be completely deleted, both of these possible solutions give this strat more layers like not only does the rotator need to push and move fast, but the remaining laners need to be able to either melee or secure last hits effectivly wich is impacted by the guns they use. So you would either have to limit the hero pools of your team to make this strat effective, or risk more by not doing so making it easier for your oponents to punish you.

[@LunaireTD]

Im realizing i've been seeing this strat happen on the enemy team and I had no idea why they were so ahead in souls. Wow, this is so cheesy

[@AeneaSXI]

Its hilariously cheesy actually. It takes literally no skill to do and if you do it and the other team doesn't you just instantly win without even beating your opponents in lane at all. I would be mad to lose just because the enemy team is premade/somehow coordinates to do this.

[@IAmJonesty]

Make lanes assignable, choose your lanes at beginning of game (with option to edit your lane once in 5 mins), lanes assigned pay the most souls, adjacent lanes pay much less. If this lowers gank worth, increase souls gained from kills outside your lane up to X minutes where X is defined by avg laning phase (gank reward).

[@EwokPanda]

TBH, the only real solution is to always have soul-splitting, or at least something like 0.75x2 for duo lanes.

[@Nauct]

The solution would be to create a counter strategy. Like pushing super hard so the enemy will lose their guardians if they rotate. Perhaps in the future giving bonus souls for first guardians will be the change

[@jonny9071]

Brilliant video with well-structured opinions. I hope that videos like this are part of the aims of the alpha, and that the developers take your feedback on board sooner rather than later. It wouldn't take many games of being dominated by Lash before a new player was put off by the game, so let's nip it in the bud whilst it's only very experienced players abusing it. I would probably go with setting an upper limit on the souls per minute to be gained from troopers, as extra soul farming can already be done using the creep camps near to the lanes, so junglers can still profit from roaming. As you say, diminishing returns on trooper value, the total value of which could also be a measure of skill expression or 'perfect laning'.

[@noyoucantsaythat]

I think they just need to remove lash from the game.

[@Kisaragi0]

real

[@ITZBROKENhotDOG12]

Not shiv? Lol okay

[@cyrix2891]

BOUNDLESS SPIRIT + SURGE OF POWER + IMPROVED BURST EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[@Tirikobruh]

the strongest-willed deadlock player be like:

[@oglocfriend]

Mad? Get good dog

[@wolfboy244]

What about having the jungle creeps agro you when you enter their domain? Chasing you, slowing you down, take a big chunk of your health unless you take your time to kill it before continuing the gank. Making it a hustle to gank to much in the early game. Maybe even make it so that for a gank to be worth it you have to co-operate with an ally to kill jungle creeps early on. Giving the other team time to react to missing opponents and defend the lane that is about to get ganked? This would make the jungle feel dangerous, scary even and the lane/guardian feel safer. It would be cool not to be the hunter in the jungle, But to be the one that is hunted.

[@wolfboy244]

I do see the problem with the map being a little too small, and some routes are freeways directly into the neighbouring lanes without entering what is considered to be the jungle. Maybe close those freeways off early on? Maybe put something to guard the freeways? Make a veil that requires you to offer something to go through? Problem is that all of my ideas adds tons of mechanics and skillcaps that could scare some players away i guess. It should be worth to gank. But is has to be challenging enough to not be able to do it over and over in such a short span of time.

[@tommyy5154]

I wouldn't even think of it as a problem. Pulling waves/camps and stacking camps in DoTA is similar, where you exploit the game mechanics to avoid hero/lane disadvantage to maximize your gain. Such mechanics wasn't originally designed on purpose but stayed as a important part of the gameplay.

[@zteeek]

in DoTA, do you also both get 100% of the XP or do you share it 50% & 50%?

[@xXasd012xX]

@@zteeek shared, it's the reason why there's a midlane and it's always solo

[@UnIucker]

the difference is that those games have split exp/gold, so by ganking or stacking in dota you are taking a share of the exp/gold, or gaining more gold because of the time a support spent stacking. In this case the souls are exp AND gold AND are 100% shared. it's not comparable at all and makes the game a boring sprintfest between lanes

[@jamilyeung]

Also keep in mind compared to other mobas it barely takes any time to rotate which is why the problem isn’t as prominent

[@Zackreaver]

The big difference in dota is exp is split based on the amount of people here. In deadlock, everyone gets full exp regardless of the amount in the area. If all 6 people were in 1 lane, the entire wave would give full souls for the first 10 minutes. This is specifically exploiting a mechanic that was designed to make sure that solo and duo lanes progress in soul counts at the same rate per wave. But people are rotating to get double the amount of souls as a result.

[@halfik83]

Add in game mechanic that allows to punish this kind of plays. Mechanic that player can use to push own late super fast. So enemy that is in rotation does miss waves. With proper heros u can do it by not allowing enemy to push ur lane. But some do not have ability to clear up wave fast enouh. So maybe so early item that allows to kill creep weaves faster to counter play double lane leeching? Item that you would not buy in any other case. Item that if you buy, does allow to punish enemy play but ur cost is - you could get better item in general. Situational item that is worth buying only if enemy is doing this double lane play. Item: green, active: double or triple nearby troopers dmg for 10-20sec. CD: durationtime + 10-20sec

[@picoto1775]

This is the most popular tactic in all the early years of moba. What they call this is "FUNNELING".

[@altoshyft]

yeah, only this issue is exacerbated by deadlock because of its foundational mechanics

[@n16r49]

Is it though? They are creating more resources from nothing not pooling their resources on 1 player. If doing this would set back the player that is being leeched of sure, but I feel like that would be a valid tactic.

[@markkim1356]

@@n16r49 support players dont require as much? dps characters scale much harder with more souls? theres a reason why its done lmao

[@picoto1775]

@@n16r49 Then why are the solo lanes holding the wave of their lanes? the idea of funneling is to put all of the resources to the desired hero carry. Supports in the case of deadlock are hindering their farming to funnel the carry.

[@justinmcelhannon8379]

While I haven't a solution that I feel totally fixes this, something tied to unrestriced / current soul sharing mechanics tied to the destruction of your lane's enemy guardian could be good. Right now guardians in the early game feel mostly inconsequential to push, even if you chunk them down over time it doesn't feel like it saves a lot of time compared to just farming as hard as possible and then coming back to solo it while much more powerful.

[@dongo22]

This is exactly the kind of content that’s necessary right now, not “TOP .01% GAMEPLAY | GONE WRONG | GONE SEXUAL”. Thanks for the video.

[@cashmoney3801]

2 fixes that also makes the game more interesting 1: add "doors" early game all quick rotations have closed doors and obstacles, meaning rotating b4 7/10 mins is much much longer or 2: and this i think is much better: make all souls you get on your non assigned lane "unsecured %"(meaning getting ALOT creeeps from other lanes makes a lot of the souls you gain even after buying unsecured and therefore putting a huge target on ur back) AND make the time unsecured souls go down take MUCH longer in early game. this reduces funneling and this problem

[@Zarzar22]

Ccnc vs Topson haha. Couldnt be a more perfectly timed comparison. What a great series between Tundra and GG

[@ClaudioProductionsX]

I think LOL solves this by having the plating system and bounty system, which could be good translated here: Plating: give the guardians 4 platings, which severely increases the guardian defense and damage. Every plating gone gives you as many souls as a kill, and this gives the tower more health. You would have to be left alone for nearly 3-4 straight minutes for a full plated tower to fall down. Bounty: Compare a player's amount of souls with the rest of the players. If he has lots, give him a bounty, which can be claimed by anyone who kills this fed player. In the same way, reduce the quantity of souls you get by killing someone that has fell behind, to reduce the amount of advantage a fed player can get. LOL also features special bounties per objectives for the teams that are behind, so they have a chance of a comeback.

[@jiotto]

Diminishing returns that fade over time would be a good compromise. Midgame rotating being a standard marker for it would be nice (when rotation is the standard play), so like 15-20m in.. or when all the first towers are lost on your side, as a sort of comeback boost for your team!

[@LegacyUntouched]

my friend stopped playing because of this. we didn't know it at the time, but we couldn't understand how our lane was 5k+ souls ahead of us. we werent dying, we were pushing our lane and then hitting mid creeps, even getting a couple kills yet they were still out farming us. glad they made this change.

[@RazielWraith]

Have a 1m:30s ( or whatever duration is best, depending on how late in the game it is ) status effect when on a lane of a specific color. While on that lane you share xp with your lane mate. Once you leave the lane, you have to wait for the status effect to expire before you can get shared xp from minions, only last hitting would count, with the exception of hero kills which would be shared as usual.

[@Zackreaver]

This is very informative, I was unaware that the soul sharing worked this way. But it makes sense when I notice that solo lanes and duo lanes get basically the same amount of souls normally. I had always thought the souls were split between the people in range, but I guess for the early 10 minutes of the game everyone gets the same amount regardless of if they are alone or not. I can see how double soaking like this could abuse that mechanic. I think the idea of limiting the amount of souls gained from troopers per minute is a good compromise. Since if you are normally hitting every trooper in your own lane as fast as possible, you shouldn't normally go this much higher in soul count. And more specifically it only targets the problem being that people are getting souls from troopers in two different lanes that are close together in the early stages of the game. Very unique problem that's unique to the game as a result of a wierd quirk I hadn't even noticed existed.

[@kivper7178]

I like the idea of making an identifier for the waves of creeps that came out at the same time so that if you clean one wave you get much fewer souls from a wave with the same identifier. But it would also be possible to make sure that you are assigned to your line only after you kill one creep, and this fixation (which will mean that effective farming will only be from your line) may be temporary, and after two minutes you will be able to kill a creep on another line so that the fixation has already passed at her. I wrote with the help of a translator, sorry for the mistakes)

[@LuceDGooseVT]

My suggestion may seem a bit crazy but bear with me: A lane streak mechanic During the lane phase, there will be a multiplier that will build up the more troopers you kill in your lane (capping at the appropriate number, like 1.5x as PURELY an example, im not a mathmetician). The multiplier resets when you go too long without killing troopers from your lane and expires when the first guardian of the lane dies. Also until a lanes guardian dies, the souls will not scale like theyre supposed to, staying at a flat amount and catching up immediately as soon as a guardian dies (this is because i just realized people may just have their lane last as long as possible to farm multiplier) The reason for this solution isn't to decentivize roaming but to incentivize staying in your lane to ensure you stay ahead in the soul game while allowing roaming to still be a choice for the more agressive fighters.

[@9891Sean]

For starters I think the lanes should be set in a traditional setup where as there are set lanes for duos and solos. 2 1 1 2 and the ability to choose which lane you want. I think this could provide the best lane set for some of these to work. Possible Solutions- - Limit 2 people to being able to buy sprint speed. This could force a meta that can equalize both sides with the most likely 2 people building sprint being ones from the duo lanes. - Make the jungle slightly stronger to farm with certain items and only allow 1 person to build these items INCLUDING sprint speed. - Make sprint and stamina items more expensive and stretch them into a 3 item build path before getting max stats. - Allow the current strat to continue until it becomes meta and everyone knows to buy stam and sprint to double leech. - Sprint uses stamina bars that decay faster with higher speed. - You can only build into 1, stamina or sprint. - Adjust characters base sprint speed and or items to curtail early game ease of double leeching. - Addition of a ranked mode to have the classic pick and ban phase. Can limit # of bans until more characters are added. Allows more adjustment to this type of play. - With the 6v6 and added lane to switch up tradition, there could be options to adjust the jungle areas a bit (location, hp, atk, resist) to make them more difficult to travel through. A not thought out option could be spawning jungle camps earlier and having them auto aggro in a large area. Let the small camps spawn at 1:30 with slightly more hp (1 extra bar or added resists) then let large camps spawn at 5 min with a larger aggro area and also replacing one or more of the small camps. This can put some unwanted damage on rotating players trying to double leech and extend the early and mid game slightly. With jungle creeps harder to kill earlier and also auto aggro to put damage on rotating players that don't take the long path, it could hopefully sway people away from being so aggressive with rotations and not allowing snow balling on souls because they're not strong enough to gobble up all of the jungle between rotations.

[@Matt-fm4vr]

Just a whole bunch of arbitrary rules

[@9891Sean]

@@Matt-fm4vrLOL! You don't even know what arbitrary means. look up the definition. Not a single one of these is arbitrary when they all focus on the possibility of changing this mans gripe of double leeching. The only thing slightly arbitrary is the want for set lanes and my idea of doing it 2 1 1 2. You're on the internet man, don't be that much of an idiot to not even look to know the words you're using.

[@Nudgarrobot]

I'm pretty agreed with the general idea of diminishing returns for excess trooper kills (Your own, not denies) per wave, before 10 minutes. It's much more intuitive than a hard cap, doesn't eliminate gank value, but doesn't incentivize risking these rotations just for their own sakes in most scenarios. The exact degree to which the diminishing returns take effect is its own balancing lever that they'd be able to tweak pretty on-the-fly. And if it were troublesome to implement pre-10 wave IDs for every wave of 4 minions, then the diminishing returns could take place just after exceeding a lane's worth of trooper spawns at a given timestamp, since that's a fixed rate. The non-wave-ID'd diminishing returns variant would also allow this to be a catch-up strategy, where teams on the back foot could pivot into trying to double soak to stay in the game if they started falling behind, which would initially hurt their itemization for fights or camp clears, but would help keep them scaled into the midgame. Depending on your perspective this could be desirable or undesirable, but generally I think it's less impactful than it seems especially given the back-foot team generally has less map pressure to facilitate doing those roams safely in the first place.

[@Nudgarrobot]

(This also avoids the centralizing problems of some of the other suggestions EG making certain lanes dedicated duo/solo lanes or locking people to their starting lane. The game is best with the most flexible assignment and strategizing options, rather than a situation where the meta is prescribed by the devs. Tweaking this mechanic to be less of an outlier allows the metagame to remain in the hands of player innovation and insight without letting it crystalize around this singular mode of play)

[@johndellany6255]

Weird idea : Make it so minions spawn 2 souls for a little bit. (Like super charged) when they come off the zipline. They lose the charge after a bit. I guess numbers can be tweaked to make the rotating exposure worth it, but just barely as long as you can pull it off without a hitch. If you get messed with, you end up behind. Meaning holding a lane is going to be detrimental. Also will make duolanes a whole lot more intense for CSing and denying.

[@troy1993]

just make it so that in the first 10 minutes of the game you can't take other lanes souls unless you kill an enemy in that lane. If you kill an enemy or assist killing an enemy in that lane then you can take the souls from that lane for the next minute. This includes killing enemies that weren't originally assigned to that lane as well. This makes it so you can't do double leeching while still incentivizing and rewarding ganks in the first 10 minutes.

[@arifpiriyev8610]

Make zipline windows at base(The ones that you go through at the start) assigh you a lane that you can share souls with(only creep souls so you can still gank). So if you want to rotate, you need to zipline back to base and to the other lane. It can have a little indicator, like changing your hero's background color at the scoreboard. It should also be enabled until the 10 minute mark. This way lane swaps on game start work as well as ganking.

[@bernardfraiture551]

You're 100% right and the proposed solution echoes what they do in League Of Legends (gold/soul isn't shared), when a support character (a champion that doesn't normally finish minions) tries to take his duo laner farm by killing the creeps, at some point he gets 50% less gold for doing so. That allows him to fix a lane by killing some minions if he is alone without exceeding the quota, but not grief his team mates by taking their farm 24/7.

[@Paladjin]

Bro thank you, some random Abrams did this to me and my boys... and he just constantly had double the farm even before laning stopped and was ganking like crazy and nobody could deal with him.. I was sure he used exploit or some hack. I could not download replay, it said Error... so I was confused how that was not working... I think it's this but maybe he was doing something else... - alas, happy to see this fixed thanks for bringing it up to the community!

[@rob6996]

Good vid. Maybe they could make it so souls are shared from the start but make the solo lanes half value for 10 mins. So you would be only taking farm away from the solo lane when you rotate making it a cost unless you can get a kill or tower.

[@KairiCaitlyn]

Imo I think this mechanic should stay in. It makes this game different than standard Mobas. When I saw this strategy being used It made me think that this game still has a lot of meta to develop and evolve. Didn't seem cheesy to me and made me think it was skillful. This game has 4 lanes and 6 people, Mobas usually have a jungler, I think 2112 was a flawed initial setup and starts like this allow creativity. I definitely think you are being subjective from a MOBA pov, cuz as a hero shooter player who doesn't really play Mobas but enjoys deadlock, I thought this strategy was cool & gave the game depth. Imo changing lane minion timings would be unbalanced, How they fix this is spawn the Jungle camps at 0 and change early game jungle so teams have to choose how they play for value and rotations (which would allow for a jungler to exist. Maybe even some form of buff spawns right at the start similar to Blue/red in LoL). Imo it does belong in the game cuz I don't think we are even close to a concise meta & there's much to learn. They spawn us into 4 lanes but there's clearly a difference between this game and LOL/Dota is this game incorporates being a 3rd person movement shooter into the formula and these type of flanks are common in the genre and fits the flow perfect to me. This game brings in multiple Povs from Moba, to hero shooter to 3rd person movement shooter and I think you are just not fully seeing this aspect which regardless of how they change the waves these type of rotations for ganks/shared farm will always exist in some capacity (which is a good thing cuz if every1 moved like a snail I think a lot of shooter players would of checked out on deadlock)

[@iamcursed1128]

Haven't put too much thought into it, but could do like a lane affinity. In theory it would start at lets just say, 20% soul value. Think of affinity as like a total of 100 points, minimum 20. If you start in purple, you have 20 points, for each x seconds in purple, your affinity goes up, to a max of 100% If you rotate out of purple to blue, your affinity would immediately go to 80% purple and 20% blue soul value. As you stay in blue, you gradually lose affinity in purple, and gain affinity in blue.

[@iamcursed1128]

To add, to not push players away from defending or rotating for big enemy waves, make it so the rate at which your affinity gains is massively increased while on a zipline. If this gets abused during laning stage, make it a buff you get when in fountain (similar to dota 2 fountain regen) that lasts for maybe 10 seconds and gives you increased affinity gain.

[@denjideadbrain]

just stretch map 5head. It does feel pretty small for all the movement tools/techs we have with a few 500 items + walljump. The thing is I believe if you ask any player that can move well they are gonna respond that the movement feels amazing (cuz it does), the problem would be the map, theres just too little space between the lanes and the jungle isn't worth to stop and do it, so ganking like shown in this video is just more profitable than doing camps. You can also get robbed of your jungle souls or just get contested and unalived if u aren't careful enough lol. EDIT: Diminishing return for creeps sounds awful, if you are ganking you want to push with the laner you ganked when it goes well in all mobas to shove and crash creeps into tower. Maybe just make the lanes that aren't your color give you less souls on last hit/steal/secure. But that would make it so we can't swap when playing in a 3+ man party. Damn balancing games must be pretty hard

[@noahcorona8989]

I wonder if there's counterplay that we haven't thought of yet. For example what if the opposing team doesn't push into the tower of the lane that's stalling? The lanes kill each other pretty fast in that case, would make the timing a lot harder

[@Ed-wx7jb]

It kind of seems like this is only possible as a by-product of being able to run to another lane and back in less time than a full wave cycle. It might be possible to fix it by just increasing the amount of time early rotations take To rotate between lanes, you have to walk through lots of doorways, buidings and back alleyways. What if in the very early game some of the main routes were shut/blocked by gates? That way it would just take a much bigger time investment or more clever movement to rotate between lanes. it could be conceptualised 'flavour-wise' as all the businesses and dangerous backstreets being locked overnight for 'public safety' (inasmuch as this is a real thing in Deadlock NYC) and opening at a set time in the morning. it may restrict player agency in the early game quite a lot and might not be possible with how big and open the map is but i think i'd personally prefer a 'physical' mitigation more than adding arcane rules and exceptions to the currency system

[@OsightblinderO]

I have 3k hours in dota 2 and my wife has 5.5k. The feedback forums are private in order to avoid influencing the communities thoughts and feelings on the game. Making videos like this circumvents that. Shared xp in the first 10 minutes is amazingly good and smart af.