Deadlock Hero Vote: How Voting and Unlock Order Work

The Deadlock hero vote now happens in the new Pregame lobby, on the Voting Machine, not in the Hideout booth most older guides still send you to. You earn one vote per Standard or Street Brawl match, every vote on the winning team counts double, and your first win of the day doubles that a second time, so one opening match can be worth four votes. Two heroes drop every Tuesday and Friday at 2:00pm PT until all six City Never Sleeps heroes are out.

The vote only sets the order. Every hero in that ballot arrives eventually, so the real question is how to move the one you want into a Tuesday or Friday slot.

Official source: Deadlock - City Never Sleeps — the "New Vote in Pregame", "First Win of the Day" and "New Hero Priority Tokens" sections, published 2026-09-29.

Where to vote: the Pregame Voting Machine, not the Hideout booth

If a guide tells you to walk to a table in the Hideout, it was written before 2026-09-29. City Never Sleeps moved the whole thing.

Valve's wording for the move, verbatim: "All voting is now done in the new Pregame lobby. Convince your allies to make the only correct choice. The winning team's votes will count as double." The retired wording, kept on the previous update page, was "Cast your votes in the ballot box located in the Hideout."

Official source: Deadlock - Old Gods, New Blood — "First Win of the Day" section. The September change is also written up in Valve's Steam announcement.

The relocation is not cosmetic. In Pregame your whole team stands in one lobby staring at the same list, so a five-stack settles on one candidate in about fifteen seconds. The Hideout booth was a solo walk across the map where you voted alone and hoped.

How many votes a match is actually worth

The third row is arithmetic, not a published example. Valve states the two rules in separate sentences, so a first daily win on a winning team is the one case where both apply. Nobody has posted an in-game confirmation of the stacked number in the 2026-10-03 build.

Two gaps in the official wording:

• Ranked. Valve's mode list names Standard and Street Brawl, and predates Ranked Mode arriving on 2026-07-30. Nobody has restated it. Assume ranked votes are unconfirmed.
• Losses. Trackers relay the in-game line as "vote once during each Standard or Street Brawl match", which implies a loss still pays. Valve's own page only says playing a match earns votes and never splits the win and loss case.

New Hero Priority Tokens are a different system

Valve lists tokens right next to the vote and most readers assume they are a second currency. They are not. From the Old Gods page: "Tokens can be used to more reliably select the new hero you want to play the most. Tokens are earned at a faster rate the more new heroes are in the pool."

Tokens decide which already-unlocked hero you get to play. They add nothing to the unlock tally, so stacking them will not outvote a lobby. The City Never Sleeps page keeps the reward but drops the explanation, saying only that "playing will earn you priority tokens." No token payout rate, earn cap, or scaling figure has been published.

When the vote closes

The unlock cadence is fixed and published; the winner inside each slot is not.

Only the first release date was announced. The other five follow from Valve's "Tuesdays and Fridays at 2:00pm PT" rule, so read the dates as derived, not as a published calendar. The six names in the ballot are Deadman Danny, Nurse Harrow, Solomon, Baba, Violet and Rat King, and Valve has published no kits for any of them.

For timezones: 2:00pm PT is 21:00 UTC while the Pacific coast is on daylight time, which is what community trackers show on their countdown clocks. That is late evening in Europe and the following morning in much of Asia, so anyone outside North America votes a day early.

The last completed round, January to February 2026

The Old Gods, New Blood round is the only vote Valve has closed out, and its numbers are the best model for the current one.

Every slot was a 2:00pm Pacific release on an alternating Monday/Thursday, as published.

Valve reported the round's statistics when Apollo went live, and they are the most useful numbers in this subject: 60,776,963 total votes were cast across the event, exactly 600 people had the foresight to only vote for the eventual winner each round, the largest winning margin was Venator over Celeste at 11%, and the highest number of votes from a single player was 813, every one of them for Celeste.

Celeste drew the loudest single bloc of the round, one player alone feeding her 813 votes, and still finished fifth. Apollo finished last. Margins here are single-digit percentages, which is why a coordinated group that switches together beats a thousand scattered singles.

Why third-party vote trackers cannot tell you who is winning

Every public tracker on this topic, deadlocklabs.gg, undeadlock.com and statlocker.gg among them, runs its own ballot on its own site and reports its own submissions. None can read the in-game tally, because Valve does not expose one.

• The three sites will always disagree, because they measure three different populations of self-selected voters.
• A tracker sitting at 60% for a hero is not saying that hero is winning the game, only that its site has more registered voters.
• The only counts that come from Valve are aggregates published after a round closes. There has been no live official figure for the current round as of 2026-10-03.

How to make your vote count

• Queue a mode Valve's wording covers (Standard or Street Brawl) and win it, the cleanest double available.
• Take your first match of the day early, before the slot is nearly decided.
• Settle the target in Pregame, out loud, with the whole lobby present.
• Cast before the match loads. Votes are tied to the Pregame screen, not the pick phase.
• Ignore tracker percentages and watch your own lobby.

FAQ

Where do I vote in Deadlock now? In the Pregame lobby, on the Voting Machine, before the match starts. The January 2026 Hideout ballot box is retired.

Does losing a match cost me the vote? Unconfirmed. Valve says playing a match earns votes and never splits the win and loss case; trackers relay the in-game line as one vote per match regardless.

Do Ranked matches earn hero votes? Nobody has said. Valve's mode list says Standard and Street Brawl and predates Ranked Mode. Check your own lobby before planning a ranked vote-farming block around it.

How many votes does the first win of the day give me? The rules read as four: one base vote, doubled for being on the winning team, doubled again for the first daily win. Valve has published no combined example.

Do New Hero Priority Tokens change which hero unlocks next? No. Tokens make it more reliable for you to pick the new hero you want to play. They do not add votes to the unlock order.

Related Guides

• Deadlock New Hero Release Schedule (Oct 2026) - the full slot table, which slots are decided, and the 2:00pm PT conversion.
• Deadlock Heroes List: Full Roster and Roles - where the 38 confirmed heroes sit and how many are playable right now.
• Deadlock Street Brawl: 4v4 Mode Rules and Rounds - the second mode that pays a vote, and how short its rounds are.
• Deadlock Rat King Guide: Kit and How to Play Him - the hero the first City Never Sleeps vote actually delivered.