Mini Dev Update #6 - October 15th 2025

Hey everyone!

The Patch 5 Beta is now live on the Rematch Beta app on Steam, and will be up until Monday morning CET,  for a tentative™ release on the live branch Oct 23rd. Patch 5 will feature a lot of bugfixes, tweaks, including on Goalkeeper dives, but most importantly there will be two significant changes, related to core gameplay and to ranked progression. 

CORE GAMEPLAY CHANGES

• Updated volley logic: in conflicted volley situations, the player closer to the ball will now more consistently win the “priority” (ie. get the volley first). 

  
  

• Updated volley height: volley max height has been reduced from 3m to 2.85m. Since volleys tend to be caught at max height and the outfield dive only has a few frames at 3m, lowering volley height will make dives a more efficient defensive tool. 

  
  

• Both these changes should have a positive impact on volley gameplay, and other changes to outfield dive are expected soon. More details will be featured in the upcoming Volley System Feature Focus. 

RANKED SYSTEM UPDATE

• League demotions: players will now be able to demote when losing 2 games in a row after reaching 0 RP in their current league. 

  
  

• Dynamic Ranking: RP gains and losses will now be dynamic, to better match player rank to their MMR: players whose rank is lower than their MMR will win more RPs when winning games and lose less points when losing games (“catch-up” adjustment). Inversely, players who rank higher than their MMR will gain less RPs when winning. Dynamic RP attribution may be tweaked in future seasons depending on our observations and your feedback. 

  
  

• Both these changes will ensure that player ranks will be closer to their actual MMR. This does mean that it will be harder to climb in the ranks - but ranking should better reflect a player’s skill level after these changes, making for fairer games. 

We’ll have more precise info on both these points in dedicated blog posts, as well as in the upcoming Patch notes. In the meantime, we wanted to share with the team visibility on how we’re updating our production processes going forward. 

Patches Creation Process

Until Patch 5, the patches we have released were trying to fix too many issues at the same time, and we continued making fixes late in the patch creation process, when the focus should have been purely on stabilizing the versions and on avoiding regressions (bugs on features/mechanics that used to be stable). As a consequence, the patches annoyingly introduced unforeseen issues - overall, it’s better to take more time to release a patch, than to try to rush a patch and risk creating new problems. 

In the recent weeks, we have reviewed and updated our patch release process, in order to ensure a better quality for patches. Patches are now locked 4 weeks before their targeted release date, in order to allow for more testing time, both automated testing, testing with our QA team, or final tests on the beta branch. As a consequence, patches should take a little longer to be released, but they should have better stability. We hope that Patch 5 will be the best patch we’ve released so far, and that the future patches will consistently improve the quality of the game. That being said, some issues are very hard to find, and may only be identified once the game is actually live with a lot of people playing, and while this shouldn’t happen nearly as frequently, we will keep counting on you to help us track them down. We greatly appreciate your help in making Rematch better through your feedback and bug reports.

Current Priorities

A lot of our time is still spent improving/fixing online gameplay issues, in order to make the gameplay experience as fair and smooth as possible. This is extremely important because in a game like Rematch, every action has the potential to determine the outcome of the game, so network-related issues can be extremely frustrating, and there is no margin for error. We have a number of improvements and fixes to squash these issues and make the game as fair as possible over the coming months. 

We are also looking into ways to improve the depth of our mechanics, to allow for more skill expression during games, and as we move forward we intend to refine certain key features of the game, such as tackles, volleys, and goalkeeping. 

In addition to these core gameplay improvements, we also want to provide variety to players and create fresh ways of experiencing Rematch, so we’ll be releasing two temporary game modes soon: a “Fireball” game mode in November, 1v1 in December.

We will share more news as we move forward, in the meantime, feel free to comment and ask any questions! 

Thanks,

The Sloclap Team