Deadlock’s been doing rather well—having lost about 30 hours to it myself over the past month, I’ve been having a pretty dang good time weaponizing my misspent youth in MOBAs gone by and wilding out about its spectacular map design.

At the time of writing, the game has a 24 hour peak of over 130,000 even in an invite-only test build—which is none too shabby, putting it over fully-released contemporaries like Helldivers 2. In other words, it’s the new hotness. Which made it all the more ripe for some agent of chaos to waltz into the game’s Discord server and cause anarchy earlier today.

Longest 2 minutes of my life from r/DeadlockTheGame

The message, posted by the server’s Carl bot (affectionately renamed Bebop, after the game’s terrifying version of Dota 2’s Pudge—a robot that can hook enemies, slap a bomb on them, then knock them into next week) was dismissed a couple of minutes later by server mod Yoshi: “Some bot exploit was used to post that,” they explained.

The rogue hacker, searching their presumably immeasurable mind palace for a retort that would further scupper Deadlock’s reputation and send the entire Discord into disrepair, reached into their 296-step plan to sink Valve’s newborn project and, in a masterstroke, replied: “(he’s lying)”. A bold move.

Obviously, Deadlock’s not going anywhere. The bot in question, Carl, is widely used in a lot of Discord servers—and while it’s a versatile little buddy, its customizability can also lead to moments like these. For instance, if you’ve got your permissions set wrong, any Joe Shmuck could use the !echo command to make the bot output a message to a specific channel. It’s not clear which devious means of deception were used, but I can see plenty of oopsies waiting to happen just shifting through its documentation page alone.

Anyway—while the post itself was deleted, thanks to the month name in the Reddit embed above I was able to determine that the date of the incident was 1:58 am BST (Poland is one hour ahead of us Brits). Scrolling up to the exact moment the server exploded took a while, with dozens of Discord messages flooding every minute of the archives. Here’s a few snippets from the #deadlock-chat channel in the immediate aftermath:

This has, naturally, also been fertile ground for the other mischief-makers to sow further chaos via the medium of shitposting. Here’s a few of my favourites, which I picked up simply by typing “Shutdown” in Discord’s chat search function:

• “I mean Deadlock blatantly infringes on multiple IPs, of course Sony is shutting them down. I have an Insider friend that says Nintendo and Microsoft will be joining Sony in a lawsuit.”
• “Gabe Newell asked Yoshi why his game wasn’t generating at least $1m USD in net profits per month by now then shut it down. All dev resources are now being diverted to Ricochet 2.”
• “BRO IMAGINE GETTING ACCESS TO THAT AND USING IT TO POST SOME GENERIC ‘WE ARE SHUTTING DOWN’ MESSAGE. BIGGEST FUMBLE OF ALL TIME. YOU COULD HAVE TALKED ABOUT LICKING BALLS.”
• “Deadlock is shutting down to contain the spread of Vindicta feet fans.”

“Guess bebop needs nerfs next patch,” Yoshi would later joke, about an hour afterwards, in between further nonsense gifs of fan favourite Ivy busting it down, gargoyle style. Whoever this roustabout is, they’ve successfully achieved absolute pandemonium.