Deadlock Servers Brought Down By Player’s Integer-Breaking Toxicity

Valve’s upcoming shooter, Deadlock, was down for several hours yesterday (Oct. 19), reportedly due to a bug caused by an extremely toxic player.

According to administrators on the Deadlock Discord, a player with a high value on their low priority score caused an issue on the backend servers. In effect, the player was so toxic, they crashed the entire game.

A Deadlock player crashed the game servers with their incredible toxicity score

Posting on the Deadlock Discord, “Yoshi,” a Valve internal employee and representative to the wider Deadlock community posted details on on the afternoon of Oct. 19

“Should be fixed now, was a bug on the backend servers. Someone had a really high low pri count.”

Low pri, or low priority refers to a system within Deadlock that means players who are toxic, get lots or reports, or abandon a lot of games (through disconnects or deliberate means), are less likely to find games with players who don’t engage in these activities. Dota 2, Valve’s other multiplayer matchmade game, uses a similar system. In this case, however, this particular player, who remains unknown, had a low priority score so high it caused issues for Deadlock’s internal servers.

Users on Twitter/X and Discord speculated that Valve was using an 8 bit integer to store the value of the low priority score. The maximum number that type of integer can store is 255. This isn’t the first time 8 bit integers have caused havoc in video games. Anyone who’s played enough of EA’s Madden series of football games will know that the maximum score able to be displayed in those games is often 255 for the same reason.

Whether this is the case, or another data storage issue was responsible (we’d like to imagine the players low priority score was lower than around nine quintillion, the maximum number stored in a 64 bit integer), we may never know. But it will forever be known that a Deadlock player was so toxic, or abandoned games so frequently, it broke the game.

Deadlock is currently still in closed beta with the title’s official release date entirely unconfirmed. Deadlock is only available to play by direct invite.

Featured Image Credit: Valve