Deadlock is giving players the chance to turn cheaters into frogs, as Valve hops on the issue in cheeky fashion

Right, so, Deadlock. That Valve shooter which an entire village worth of people were already playing before it was officially announced as being a thing. It's now letting players choose to turn those detected as having cheated into frogs before the ban hammer comes down.

As with any big, competitive online game, it didn't take long for Deadlock to develop some folks who were trying to gain an unfair advantage, even while it was still in in the penguins of Madagascar 'you didn't see anything (waves arms)' phase of existence. Thankfully, Valve's latest patch kicks off the process of tackling that issue.

As you can see from the videos of unarmed amphibians hopping around in Deadlock matches, the publisher's taken a rather toungue-in-cheek approach to telling those pesky cheaters to knock it off and play properly.

"Added an initial Anti-Cheat detection system," reads a section of the game's latest set of patch notes, "When a user is detected as cheating, during the game session the opponents will be given a choice between banning the user immediately and ending the match or turning the cheater into a frog for the rest of the game and then banning them afterwards." "The system is set to conservative detection levels as we work on a v2 anti-cheat system that is more extensive," Valve continues, "We will turn on the banning of users in a couple of days after the update is out. When a match is ended this way, the results will not count for other players."

So yup, if you hop into Deadlock and end up in a session with a cheater, you can vote to turn them into a harmless creature you can have some fun shooting at as it bounces about all over the shop. It looks like it makes for just as hilarious a little break from the action as advertised too, with players of the non-cheating variety understandably looking forward to ending up in a match that lets them give it a go.

As for the rest of the patch that accompanies this addition, there's a new hero called Mirage, some other new stuff like a "custom Match play mode", and a heap of balancing tweaks. You can check out the full - and pretty lengthy - rundown here.

Valve made changes earlier this month aimed at curbing issues like players just abandoning matches for no good reason - rage quitters, basically - so, it's nice to see the publisher continue to round out how its game handles upholding the rules of engagement.