Two days after the patch, Valve quietly speeds up help for players who are behind
Build 6698, shipped on September 18 without notes, cuts the passive souls queue from 30 to 20 seconds, the very channel the September 16 patch had just picked to redistribute comeback gold to the two poorest players.
On September 16, the patch note explained that part of the comeback souls earned by players ahead would now be redistributed to the team's two poorest players, through the passive souls system. We covered it in our patch analysis. Two days later, on September 18 at 16:31 UTC, Valve shipped build 6698, without a line of notes. It touches only a settings file, and it is precisely that system it adjusts.
What changes
A team's passive souls are not paid out instantly. They accumulate in a queue of ten periods, then are paid to players in small pulses. The file itself describes the effect of a period's length: the longer it is, the longer the delay between the team earning the gold and the player benefiting from it.
Build 6698 cuts that length from 3 to 2 seconds, and the pulses per period from 3 to 2. Payout rhythm does not move, one pulse per second. What moves is the depth of the queue: 30 seconds before, 20 seconds now. The help meant for players who are behind reaches them a third faster.
Everything else is unchanged: the system starts at minute eight, and the shares reserved for the poorest and second-poorest player remain 2.5% and 1.5%.
Why it makes sense
The September 16 patch made this channel the main catch-up tool: 70% of the comeback surplus now flows through it. A thirty-second delay for gold meant to help a player who just died or lost their lane is long in a Deadlock match. Valve most likely saw, over the first two days, that the help arrived too late to matter, and tightened the queue without saying so.
It is the third silent build since the patch, and the only one that touches the game. The other two, on September 17, only changed internal strings.
What we cannot claim
The effect on matches. A third less delay on a 2.5% share is a fine-tuning: it will not show in a win rate, and we will not pretend to measure it. What it says is that Valve is watching the comeback rework closely and adjusting it in the following days, without going through a note.
Methodology. Build 6698 caught by our watch, commit of the SteamDatabase/GameTracking-Deadlock repository touching `DumpSource2/convars.txt`, `server_strings.txt` and `steam.inf`. Settings read: `citadel_tick_gold_period_duration_s` (3 → 2), `citadel_tick_gold_pulse_per_period` (3 → 2), `citadel_tick_gold_periods` (10), `citadel_tick_gold_payout_for_lowest` (0.025), `citadel_tick_gold_payout_for_second_lowest` (0.015), `citadel_tick_gold_start_time` (480 s). Absence of notes checked on Deadlock's Steam feed. Every shipped build is listed on our updates page.