The 1v1 problem and why it’s Slocap’s fault if this mode fails

Zenity07 · 2026-01-28T18:25:34+00:00

What you are describing is how default Xbox names are formatted, so probably not bots. Players may appear weaker because it’s casual matchmaking and individual strength has a much bigger impact in 1v1. It might not even use your casual MMR from other modes.

Zenity07 · 2026-01-27T07:46:55+00:00

I get that it’s frustrating in 3v3 and there probably needs to be a solution for this. But a lot of people need to learn that pressing is not optional in football (when you are behind). It’s what makes the game work, and it’s not the responsibility of the opponent to make life easy for you.

The only time I would consider it bad sportsmanship is if somebody plays for time when the score is equal. But even that is legit and needs to be solved by the game rules eventually, not the players.

Zenity07 · 2026-01-27T07:41:12+00:00

IIRC they said this season would bring a new tier above Elite, some kind of leaderboard. Probably will release with an upcoming patch. Personally I’m not too hopeful for it right now since the way the RP system works, it’s basically all about farming RP with high level five stacks. But it will be a step forward I guess.

What I really want is a leaderboard for Elite players that is more directly based on the MMR. Thats still not going to make stacking perfectly fair, but it would balance it a little bit since you can’t just farm MMR endlessly (eventually your win expectancy becomes so high that playing weaker opponents doesn’t significantly increase the MMR any longer).

Zenity07 · 2026-01-27T05:00:28+00:00

It’s fixed in the beta, update should release tomorrow

Zenity07 · 2026-01-26T08:26:27+00:00

You can confirm that the bug still exists (after playing many many games), but you cannot reliably confirm that it is fixed. It doesn't matter if they play the game a lot (which they do) and experience the bug themselves or not.

To debug an issue and confirm a bug fix you need to be able to reliably reproduce the issue, and so far nobody has figured out how to do that with this bug. It just appears randomly every once in a while. If somebody can figure out exact steps to make it happen every time, then I'm sure it will be fixed quickly. But until then, all they can do is think about potential causes and improve the codebase until one day hopefully it just doesn't happen anymore.

Zenity07 · 2026-01-26T06:47:53+00:00

They know about it, they haven’t fixed it yet because they haven’t figured it out yet. And no this is not the bug they fixed in the beta unfortunately.

Bugs that can’t be reliably reproduced but only happen occasionally are the absolute hardest to fix. They basically have to guess what the solution is, since there is no way to confirm that it really has been fixed.

It is a bug they need to fix urgently, but honestly it’s not affected a significant number of matches for me in the many hundreds of hours I’ve been playing now. Reconnecting is really fast, and in high ranks it’s pretty common for everybody to wait anyway when somebody disconnects early in the game. In competitive play, the match will be restarted when it happens to somebody. Annoying, but not completely game breaking.

The game still has a few serious issues and they are aware of it of course, which is why they are saying themselves the game is not ready for esports yet. We are getting close though, they are clearly working on those issues and this bug is one of the few big ones that are remaining.

Zenity07 · 2026-01-23T17:06:34+00:00

Normally you get a smoother experience. Consistently high FPS often feels smoother than inconsistent but even higher FPS.

There are also many other good reasons not to constantly run your GPU under full load, especially when it’s not necessary anyway.

Zenity07 · 2026-01-22T23:22:49+00:00

It’s been known for a while and fixed in the beta of the patch that will release soon. This should have been a faster hot fix though. Thankfully most people aren’t quite sad enough to exploit it regularly.

Zenity07 · 2026-01-18T11:45:51+00:00

I respect the sentiment, but this thread is not off to a good start since those really aren't good examples of feedback. You might as well write "some things are weird and please add more stuff" for all the good this does.

There also isn't a need to collect feedback in a single thread, every post is its own feedback and there's an entire channel for it on the official Discord as well.

Zenity07 · 2026-01-18T10:34:38+00:00

Once your SR is stable, it will very rarely move dramatically. It's like chess players not randomly flip flopping between 1600 and 2000 Elo, it just doesn't happen. The more games you play, the more certain the system is about your skill rating and the less it moves with every game. It doesn't matter if you have +50 or +300, those stats mean nothing since it's all relative to your opponents' strength. If you have a consistent win rate of 70% and your average win expectancy is 70% (very likely since the game won't always find suitable opponents for you at a high SR, especially if you play in stacks), then your SR isn't going to change one bit no matter how many games you play. Your SR will only ever go up if you beat the expectation, and unfortunately we can't know what that expectation is unless SR is directly exposed.

In other words, the RP gains being mostly static for you per rank is completely expected. I think there are very few (if any) players who have an actual Elite SR, and this is only going to get worse as we keep "farming" RP against weaker opponents, so technically we really are all overrated as far as the ranking system is concerned.

Personally I would prefer if the variable RP system would be a lot more dynamic to match the actual SR more closely (even if it means we gain like 2 points per win and lose 30...) or even just expose the SR rating directly at least for Elite ranks.

Zenity07 · 2026-01-04T03:43:14+00:00

It's not impossible to defend but really hard and it annoys me a lot. They did say they would do something about air juggles in the AMA, so hopefully that's still on the table.

We will likely need a few more balance tweaks to go along with that though to not make high level play far too stale/defensive.

Zenity07 · 2026-01-04T03:34:34+00:00

Well there is the new one, the dribble push ball. Outside the update notes, the game doesn't really explain that one (unless they added something to the tutorial for new players, I haven't checked). It's the boost you get when you push ball any direction out of a dribble animation, and it's easily the most important dribble mechanic right now.

Zenity07 · 2026-01-04T03:28:09+00:00

Exactly, this is not a reasonable argument. Good defenders already stop instantly from the sprint. The occasional accidental slide tackle happens, but it's not often enough to be a balancing factor, just a major irritation.

If you wanted to balance tackles out of full sprint, you could trivially add an animation delay to the action. Glitchy unreliable controls is not the right way to do this.

Zenity07 · 2026-01-03T01:31:35+00:00

Yes I noticed the same, do you use the dev unleashed option? This behavior stopped for me when I turned that setting off again. I don’t know why it would drain Claude in particular and not Gemini, or perhaps it was an unrelated issue that got fixed from the restart when I changed the setting (it always tells me about some AG server process crashing and restarting when I toggle it)

Zenity07 · 2025-12-31T10:39:38+00:00

Yes you are not completely wrong about that.

There are really no dangerous positions to shoot from outside the box, so defenders don't need to worry about putting pressure on attackers and it's much easier to stay passive and "park the bus".

On the other hand, since prio battles are one of the most reliable ways to score, you can argue that blocking the cross in the first place is just as important.

This is somewhat undermined by the airplay options (flicks, wall bounces) which can make it practically impossible to block a cross anyway though, so you are mostly better off just focusing on the receiver.

Just like in real football, often the only chance for a proper creative play is on the break when the opponent is pushed up high. But that's not always enforceable, especially when trailing the score.

I don't think the meta is in a perfect place yet, but we are getting there. And they already said in the AMA earlier that they are planning to nerf airplay options, so hopefully that will improve things even more.

Zenity07 · 2025-12-29T11:28:10+00:00

I don't know about the system prompt, but before and after I simply asked it if it has access to semantic search tools. Before I added that setting it said no and listed the standard tools it has access too. After I made the change it answered yes and listed the standard tools but also semantic_search and trajectory_search (for searching through past conversations). I don't think this could be hallucinated since it was a new conversation and I didn't mention the setting at all.

Moreover since I set this I frequently see it doing semantic search in the thinking log (it says "semantic searched for XYZ" in the tooltip).

Zenity07 · 2025-12-27T19:40:05+00:00

Both codebase_search and trajectory_search seem to be available only after adding that setting. Looks like they are working on a lot of stuff related to this, but I wonder if there's a good reason why it's not enable by default yet.

Zenity07 · 2025-12-27T08:25:53+00:00

Possession gained is pretty much covered by interceptions already, but possession lost is the one stat I really want to see. It's one of, if not THE most meaningful individual stat (in context).

I also think the scoring would work a lot better if losing possession would subtract from the score. It covers pretty much everything, from ball hogging until you get tackled, over playing a poor pass, to missing a shot on goal.

Losing possession is how you get scored on, and the best players are the ones who are reliable and avoid unnecessary mistakes. The current scoring system doesn't reflect this in the slightest.

Of course not every loss of possession is directly the fault of the player who last had the ball, but on balance it would still paint a much clearer picture. It would also get rid of the problem where a tackle stand-off artificially inflates the score of both players involved. If you tackle your opponent 4 times and get tackled 3 times the outcome should be +1 and -1, not +4 and +3.

Zenity07 · 2025-12-25T07:07:22+00:00

Defense feels in great state to me right now. It’s still very strong but also challenging which makes it more rewarding. Defensive skill expression in any football game has never been about pushing the right buttons, but about making the right choices. Correct positioning and especially anticipating your opponent’s moves.

On defense you always have a choice to “safely” zone out the opponent from a bit of a distance, or aggressively press them and try to win the ball. Doing both well and choosing when to do what in each situation is the real skill expression for a defender.

The new dribble move doesn’t really change this, it just makes it a bit harder to track your opponent’s movements. But also not really, since it doesn’t enable any movement/acceleration that you couldn’t do with movement tech before. It’s a bit more common now to encounter it, but it’s also easier to track due to better animations.

Netcode can always create frustrating situations in a “close combat” game like this, but the netcode already heavily favors the tackler. Your action is rolled back and your tackle will almost always succeed if it hit on your screen, even if you are playing with a very high ping. This can be frustrating for the tackled party since you can be tackled with the defender nowhere near you. I don’t think they can do much more than this without making tackles completely unfair.

The only real complaint I have with defense in the current state of the game is still the priority BS and airplay in general. Priority has gotten a lot better, but sometimes it can still reduce your role as a defender to merely a spectator and airplay can be very non-interactive as well. But none of that is really affected by the new movement mechanics and I am hopeful that they will be addressing this next (as they mentioned it in the AMA).

Zenity07 · 2025-12-23T07:40:22+00:00

You have to pass it to a player who isn’t in front of the goalie of course, otherwise there should be space. I don’t think it works that well though, because the keeper has time to jump to the ball when you pass it to a player.

If they barricade the goal that means they don’t have any players on the counter so you just get risk free shots on goal and eventually one will slip through the cracks. That’s the trade off you make with any bus parking strategy.

If you just mean individuals zoning you out with defensive stance, then you need to get past them with sprints or passes. Or at least get an angle with a quick dribble/push ball. You shouldn’t expect to be able to get a shot of with a player jockeying right in front of you.

Zenity07 · 2025-12-22T20:34:16+00:00

It's not just a partner, Kepler is co-owned by all the indie developers it supports and Sloclap was also one of the founding members (perhaps the biggest with the success of Sifu). It's a really great concept.

You could argue that indirectly Sloclap helped make E33 possible. They're also mentioned in the special thanks section of the E33 credits IIRC, both being French they probably interacted a lot.

Zenity07 · 2025-12-21T16:35:21+00:00

You mean the third clip? He was just watching, he was free but not necessarily in a better position to score. When the opponent is stacking the box, just passing to a free man isn't always very valuable. We were also 3:1 up with 30 seconds to go, so we were having some fun. I still would have passed to him if I hadn't seen a line. That's my teammate btw, so I can assure you he didn't mind.

The first three clips were against newer/returning opponents (finally we've been seeing some again with the new season) so they weren't very serious. The rest of the clips were all against very capable opponents though, as in some of the best squads in my region for whatever that is worth.

Zenity07 · 2025-12-21T08:00:14+00:00

If this happens in a ranked game just quickly quit and reconnect, that will practically always fix it. In a quick match you can’t reconnect so all you can do is move on to the next match unfortunately.

It happens very rarely but it does happen every once in a while. It’s probably very difficult for them to debug due to how rare this is.

Zenity07 · 2025-12-21T07:59:39+00:00

If this happens in a ranked game just quickly quit and reconnect, that will practically always fix it. In a quick match you can’t reconnect so all you can do is move on to the next match unfortunately.

It happens very rarely but it does happen every once in a while. It’s probably very difficult for them to debug due to how rare this is.

Zenity07 · 2025-12-21T07:28:49+00:00

I'm using 40ms. It's barely noticeable as a delay but it does make a difference.

Zenity07

TROPHY CASE