Exploit/Balancing

Outfield Dive : (aka Dolphin Dive) tweaked values to make the character speed lower during the ability’s recovery period.

• We are closely monitoring how the game and its meta are evolving day after day, and we are seeing a lot of new mechanics and ways to play being discovered by our players. We think a lot of these are cool and interesting, but some others have a negative impact on the game

• The ability to spam the dive to instead of sprinting is one mechanic that is a clear balancing issue. It allows players to bypass the limitations of stamina and sprint speeds, and has a negative impact on the look and feel of the game.

• We have adjusted the speed of the player during the recovery of the ability to make the dive spam less efficient as an acceleration exploit.

• This is a small enough adjustment but will have an impact on how the ability feels and functions even in legitimate circumstances, so we will be monitoring these effects closely.

• We are looking at more precise ways of resolving these issues in future updates, but it will take a bit more time and we felt we needed a solution now to this exploit.

Wall Dribbling/Climbing : we aimed to fix some issues that allowed players to “fly” and avoid all interactions with the other players by spamming volley lob taps against a wall.

• This is another mechanic that is completely at odds with our vision of Rematch as a football game.

• The fix involves making the ball interactable 5 frames later than it used to be. This also affects abilities other than taps, such as being able to perform a volley shot (or any other volley action) after a volley lob tap on a very high ball.

• This removes the aforementioned issue but will also have an impact on the rest of the game, specifically by making some solo backboard setups harder to execute.

• As such we feel this is a good thing for the game. It does not remove the mechanic but makes it more demanding in terms of player focus and precision.

• We will keep monitoring the effect of this change on the rest of gameplay mechanics, and will rely on player feedback to further adjust the feel of the game.

Rematch is a game with a lot of complex interactions between mechanics and even the smallest change can have a big impact on how the game is played. At the same time, we must be able to answer serious issues in gameplay in a timely manner. Our objective is to refine this balancing act between the pacing of fixes, and the stability of the game and its mechanics. We admire the way players have come up with new emergent mechanics and advanced techs, some of which add a healthy amount of depth to the game, but some of these unintended mechanics cause more harm than good, and we think they should be removed from the game. We will post a new devblog about these emergent mechanics and our intentions about how we, as developers, wish to deal with them.

Bugfixes

• Fixed cam jitter during goal replays

• Various fixes on stability issues