Valve is adding an 'extra competitive' option to Deadlock that'll make matches harder, but only because everyone in this mode refuses to speak

Valve added a competitive mode to Deadlock back in October. This drastically improved matchmaking by sorting everyone into 11 ranks, which were more in keeping with players' skill level, but now there's another way to raise your blood pressure.

As the December 6 patch notes reveal, Valve has introduced an "extra competitive option" for players to venture into: "If you prefer to play with higher levels of coordination, communication, and competitiveness, then you can use this option to tell the matchmaker to build your team with like-minded allies. This option will sometimes be inactive in scenarios where the pool is very shallow (large portions of Eternus, off-peak hours like 5 am, extremely long queue, etc.), but otherwise, in most normal scenarios, the matchmaker will attempt to find you similar players."

You can turn up the competitiveness in your Deadlock games by simply clicking a box that appears after opening Queue Options, which you can find on the dashboard under your profile. Alongside this are also options for tweaking lane preference and incoming chat.

Before anyone decides to throw caution to the wind and give extra competitive a go, I do need to warn you that it isn't for the faint of heart. This mode should really only be restricted to high-level Moba players who are willing to go the extra mile within games. You need to be on top of calls, terms, and tactics—it's not just good enough to be half-decent at aiming and know when to farm creeps. At least, in theory. In practice, it seems to be going about as well as you'd expect.

"[I] tried 'extra competitive' mode and had one leaver and one person using the mic, lol," one player says. Turns out, asking people to check a box that says 'I'll be communicative and tryhard' isn't actually a guarantee that they'll do either of those things. Well, my team was pretty chatty in the match that I joined. But they had a lot to 'talk' about when it came to my incompetence, so that may have been the driving force.

Some players are so frustrated with poor teammates in this mode, they think Valve should introduce harsher penalties. "If you want to leave an extra competitive game for any reason, you should be banned from re-queuing the mode for 24+ hours," SilverFan3702 says. "You want to play in higher-standard games? You can, at the very least, ensure that you can sit at your computer for 45 minutes before hitting the queue button."

The comms in Deadlock have gotten exceedingly worse as time has gone on. When I first started playing the closed beta, almost everyone was in team chat and was pretty responsive to calls. But now, most matches I enter have hardly anyone speaking up, and the people who are in are usually just using their airtime to flame other players—it's not a very productive environment. It also used to be the case that if you had any communication bans, you'd be blocked from playing any competitive mode, which helped keep everyone talking.

So when it comes to the extra competitive mode, it's probably best to just stay with your usual matchmaking settings—it's likely they'll be easier to deal with and probably full of better teammates.