The patch nobody read: rank points up 20%
On August 2, Valve raised ranked gains by a fifth. No Steam patch notes: the announcement went out on the official Discord, and most trackers missed it.
If your rank bar has been climbing faster these past few days, you weren't imagining it. On August 2, Valve changed two values in Ranked mode:
Points per game went from 250 to 300, a 20% increase. And the maximum win-streak bonus rose from +75 to +90, reached at five consecutive wins.
No patch notes accompanied the change. It was announced by a Valve developer on the game's official Discord, and nowhere else. That is enough to reach the most invested players, and nowhere near enough for the information to travel: the sites tracking Deadlock — ours included — feed on the Steam news flow. What doesn't pass through it doesn't exist to them.
Why the guides contradict each other
This update explains a confusion you may have run into. Search for how many points a Deadlock win is worth and you'll find two answers. Some sites say 250, others 300. Both were right — just not on the same day.
The July 30 notes, the ones that launched Beta Season 1, did state 250 points on average. Three days later the value had changed, and the document was never corrected.
The system, with the numbers up to date
A Ranked game is worth roughly 300 points, won or lost. The word "roughly" matters: the amount is adjusted against what the matchmaker expected. Beating a team you were tipped to lose to pays more; losing to one rated below you costs more. That is what produces the spread you see from game to game.
On top of that sits the streak bonus, now capped at +90 points from five wins in a row.
For progression, a subrank costs 1,000 points and a full rank 2,000. At the new rate, a subrank comes down to a little over three net wins instead of four.
The game also cushions bad evenings: at the bottom threshold of a subrank you get two games of grace before dropping, and five before losing a full rank.
One exception sits at the very top. For Eternus players the fixed tiers give way to percentile thresholds, recalculated daily. At that level your rank no longer reflects a point total but your standing against everyone else.
What it actually changes
Ten weeks is a short season in which to climb twelve ranks. Raising gains by 20% and sweetening streaks four days after launch reads as a pacing correction: Valve likely judged progression too slow to carry players to October 7.
For you, it mostly means the benchmarks published last week are already out of date. And that the official Discord remains, for lack of anywhere better, where the real balance decisions are said first.