Patch #10 Beta Notes - 1.203.000

Patch Information

1.203.000

Patch 10 Beta: March 12th, 2026

Release Date: March 25th, 2026

Intro

Hi everyone!

Season 3 is an important milestone for REMATCH. We are starting to reach our stride, and improving our processes is showing results. Our velocity for introducing new features and changes to the game is still not quite where we want it, but we are comfortable adding more and more thanks to our overall stability.

We are introducing a first batch of Social and Progression features, to improve the overall experience of playing Rematch, and also starting to implement more impactful changes to the Core Gameplay.

These are the first steps of a long-term strategy to get Rematch to its full potential, and we are very grateful to all our players, from the most casual to the top of the elite, for giving us the chance to keep improving the game.

The Sloclap Team

Progression & Social Features

On top of the considerations of core gameplay, there are systems that we are aiming to improve extensively in the future patches and seasons. Among these are the topics of Progression, Social, FTUE (first time user experience), UX improvements, and Moderation (Reporting).

In Season 3, we are introducing three new features that are only the first part of this long term plan.

Periodic Challenges

Weekly and daily challenges are now available. Complete periodic objectives to earn Battle Pass tokens.

1. Repeatable challenge: Play 5 matches to earn 1 token. Once completed, this challenge is repeatable.

2. Daily challenge: Each day, complete a new challenge to earn 1 token. The daily challenge refreshes at 23:59 UTC.

3. Weekly challenges: Each week, complete a new set of challenges to earn 2 or more tokens. Weekly challenges refresh on the same weekday the Season started, at 23:59 UTC.

Details

• Tokens can’t be earned by gaining XP anymore.

• The daily win bonus is no longer available.

Progression mechanics and features are essential for players to feel like their time in the game matters. Periodic challenges are a modest first addition to make sure that you can end a session while being reassured that you accomplished something (and that you didn’t just yoyo between two divisions in ranked mode).

We are currently hammering in final design decisions to add more extensive, polished and rewarding progression mechanics addressed to all of our players.

Team-up

Ever had a great experience with your teammates and wished you could play together again immediately? You can now request your teammates to squad up directly at the end of a match at the press of a button! If one or more players choose to team-up, a new squad will be created with the first player to ask for the team-up as leader.

“Team-up” is a recurrent request from our players, and is an obvious addition to Rematch. Outside of competitive gameplay, a lot of players engage with Rematch as a cool experience to share with friends or others, and we want to lean into and encourage that aspect of the game. This requires features that foster a positive social environment, as well as others to discourage negative behavior (which we have planned to deliver soon).

End-of-match screen

We’ve reworked the end match screens to condense progression information in a single summary page (profile level, battle pass periodic challenges and ranking information are now on the same screen). 

The MVP can now also come from the losing team.

With the addition of more progression mechanics, we wanted to take the opportunity to make the “end of match” screen feel more complete and rewarding. We are currently working on a few more improvements to make it more comfortable to read the stats at the end of a game.

Matches / Core Gameplay Improvements

As we discussed in previous communications (Mini dev Update#5 https://www.playrematch.com/post/mini-dev-update-5-september-12th-2025), we needed to improve the overall stability of the game to be able to deliver more impactful changes to the gameplay and metagame. We are getting there, and season 3 is the first step of a strategy of improvements to the core gameplay.

There is a lot of debate around the strength of defense vs attack, as well as the place of “dribbling” and “dribbling techs” in the game. Our strategy has not changed since that dev update: keeping emerging and high-level mechanics as much as possible, but removing egregious examples of the ball teleporting, and unnatural and unreadable player movements.

Season 3 will see core gameplay changes on:

1. Goalkeeper pass back rules

2. Defensive Abilities

3. A targeted change/nerf to “Vexis Dash”

4. A few stamina values

5. Extra effort animation

The overall objective is to make all parts of the gameplay more refined and rewarding, while pushing the balance in the right direction. From a bird’s eye view, the balancing of the game is acceptable. Games are often very close, going down to the wire and being decided by a single decisive action. Goals are rare enough to “feel like football”.

In that sense, you could argue that goalkeeping and defending are in the right place, or even “too strong”. We do agree that having slightly more goals would be better for the game in a general sense.

But that is a bit of a surface analysis, and there are a lot more levels of depth to the current situation. Passive defense today is strong, while active defense is often unrewarding. In the same way, defending as a group in the box is easy enough but putting pressure alone higher up on the pitch is a bit more haphazard.

In a sense, “emergent mechanics” are necessary for dribblers to beat defenders, but their existence restricts our ability to balance defensive abilities; which means more legitimate dribbling abilities have a hard time finding their place. Overreacting and buffing defensive abilities indiscriminately would squash dribbling abilities and force players to lean harder into “advanced techs” (or exploits) to have any chance to express skill and score goals. We are aiming to fix that over time by nudging all the different moving parts of the equation in the right direction at a similar rate.

Some of the mechanics in Rematch are still a bit rough, with big hitboxes and unclear hits and resolutions. As the game matures, and we develop better underlying systems, we can refine the feel and visual fairness of the game, and in consequence we can better answer balancing issues. We will also be able to introduce new gameplay features that allow players to express skill and create variety (as we started doing with dribble into push ball and dribble into lob push ball).

These patch notes will go into more detail than usual to try and contextualize what we are trying to do, give insights on what’s coming next and, hopefully, communicate how we are trying to improve the game for everyone.

Goalkeeper Passback

New Goalkeeper rule: Once goalkeepers catch a ball, they can't catch it again until an opponent interacts with it. This is feedbacked by two elements:

• The ball is at the goalkeeper’s feet (ball in hand = safe, ball at feet = vulnerable).

• A red circle is displayed at the feet of the goalkeeper → if you take control of the ball in this state, you will do so with your feet and be vulnerable

Passing back to an invulnerable goalkeeper can create uninteresting game states. This change is aimed at avoiding the most egregious instances of time wasting, while keeping the rule predictable and understandable at all levels of play. We spent time cleaning the way this feature was set up, which will allow us to iterate on it if necessary. We will be monitoring the impact of this change closely.

Defensive abilities

The balance between attacking and defensive abilities in Rematch is core to every match. We currently have a number of issues that we want to address over the long term, amongst which the imbalance between active and passive defending.

The best way to defend is to stay locked in Defensive Stance, and wait for your opponents to make a mistake. This does feel like “real football”, and is not a bad thing per se, but we do believe the game would be more interesting if actively attacking the ball holder was a more impactful option. This is intensified by the existence of many “emergent mechanics/techs” that are very hard to defend with active abilities like tackles and dives. 

Our strategy over time is to incrementally push all different aspects of the equation in the right direction: removing egregious dribbling exploits, and improving more legitimate mechanics to have a better balanced and more controlled gameplay.

Tackles

• Reduction of standing tackle assist/redirection by 25%

• Tackle hitboxes: hitbox around the feet is 10% larger to compensate tackle assist changes

• Tackle hitboxes: hitbox around the body reduced to avoid “phantom hits”

• Standing Tackles: range slightly improved - 5% (animation will bring you further)

• Standing tackle now has mirrored animations. Depending on the ball location, the player will tackle with their left or right foot. This allows for the hitbox to have more understandable and logical hit reactions (hits closer to the center)

• Some fixes on hits not registering correctly when hitting a player during ball control

• Sliding tackle will no longer be triggered if defensive stance input is held. This should solve some instances of sliding tackles coming out instead of standing tackles.

  
  

One aspect we wanted to address is the “tackle assist”. In its current implementation, it can create some strange redirections. It was also tweaked too strongly, which meant that you could in some cases be redirected towards a ball even if you had misread its trajectory or the dribbling player’s action. On top of that, the redirection would sometimes take over and make you miss your mark (when you try to predict opposing dribbles).

To compensate for the loss in the ease of execution, we added more “oomph” to the tackle by making it go a bit further, and improving its hitboxes. The idea is to make it more demanding but also more powerful and consistent when used correctly. We will keep observing and iterating on these tweaks, and have more improvements on tackles already planned in the coming patches.

Defensive Stance & Dash

• Defensive Stance: 8% hitbox size reduction both as an outfield and as GK hitboxes reduction.

• Dash now goes slightly further (up to +15% speed)

  
  

We are comfortable with this adjustment on the Defensive Stance since it goes in the direction of multiple of our objectives. It should give more space for ground play, reduce the number and egregiousness of “phantom hits” (balls bouncing off invisible collisions), and slightly reduce the effectiveness of passive defence. We will keep a close eye on the impact of this change on the overall defensive experience but our tests seem to indicate that this slight “nerf” is acceptable.

The defensive dash tweak should make it more effective at following dribbling and juking opponents. We want to give this ability a stronger place in the defensive matrix and have more improvements planned for the coming patches.

Stamina

• Dribble (L2 + X / LT + A / Left Ctrl + Space) stamina cost reduction

• Sprint Start stamina cost reduction (specifically the cost of starting to sprint)

  
  

Stamina balancing is a specific design subject we are going to iterate on very soon. We will develop systems that allow better impact abilities depending on a player’s current stamina, in an effort to better reward good stamina management, and punish wasteful players. In the meantime, we wanted to tweak a few values to better reward players that use legitimate dribble and sprint mechanics to break away from opponents. The change in sprint stamina should also help defenders keep with the flow of the game and react to quick changes of direction.

Dribbles

• Some exploits allowing to magnetize the ball have been removed, specifically during “Vexis Dash”

• Fixed an issue where controlling the ball right after a Dash would cause an extra forward movement (a component of the “Vexis Dash”) 

  
  

With that we are targeting some specific issues we have around the “Dash into Ball Control”, sometimes referred to as “Vexis Dash”. The idea of a mechanic that allows the player to bait defenders in one direction while going in the other is interesting, but a couple of bugs allow it to create unnatural and unpredictable movements, as well as “magnetizing” the ball from far away, making these interactions feel unfair.We are not done fixing all the issues we have around techs/exploits (depending on the interpretation), but are working on some fixes that should arrive very soon around unintended uses of the “Dribble” (“flicker”, 0 stam dribbles, etc.). Some of these are caused by rollbacks/network resolution and are therefore a bit trickier.

Extra Effort, Sprint & Dive

• New Extra Effort start animation makes triggering the ability in an input direction more reactive both with and without the ball

• Added new animations to make turning while sprinting in ball possession snappier

• Fixed an issue where Extra Effort Dive could get cancelled

  
  

Improving locomotion is still a key objective for Rematch, both for game feel and balancing reasons. These changes on extra effort should also smooth out the ability and remove some bugs associated with it.

Volley Tap

• Updated volley tap trajectory, for high height volley taps: the initial  ball trajectory is more direct towards the ground and doesn't make a small lob anymore. 

• The power of those volleys has also been (very) slightly increased. 

We’ve had issues with the volley tap’s power feeling inconsistent. Some bug fixes happened in patch 9 and this tweak in patch 10 should make those high height volleys feel stronger. They should also be easier to aim down towards the goal (previously, a header performed close to the penalty spot would go above the goal or hit the bar).