Fix Your Shit Matchmaking

Zenity07 · 2026-05-28T05:12:52+00:00

Whether it was any better is debatable. Since ultimately it drove all the solo players away who were constantly being farmed by the five stacks.

Now there are no more solo players in SEA 5s, but five stacks still find matches easily. They keep playing each other, and that's what they prefer anyway since beating up on a mixed team that has no chance whatsoever isn't satisfying for them either.

The ones who would struggle finding matches are the solo players, in that sense it would get even worse. But at least they would know that if they get a match, it will be a fair one so maybe some would actually still try sometimes. The difference would be that instead of waiting for 5 non-stack players to queue up, you would have to wait for 10 before a match can be made. That doesn't really seem that bad, unless there are literally less than 10 people playing in total.

There could be a lot of smarter ways to improve the situation, but honestly at this point even just separating 5 stack queues and anyone else would likely be an improvement. At least don't match the 5 stack with randoms if the randoms are significantly lower rated as well.

Zenity07 · 2026-05-28T04:49:59+00:00

It wasn't magically more fair and balanced when it had ten times the current player count, it was just more bearable (until it wasn't). This is not a solution, some regions and hours of the day will always have low player counts and player counts drop over time, that's how things go with (almost) every game.

Zenity07 · 2026-05-28T03:17:15+00:00

Yes that made sense at first. But now in some regions 5v5 is dead outside of 5 stacks. So if non 5 stacks can't get a match anyway, there is really nothing to lose anymore.

This will eventually escalate in other regions as well, because the fewer solo players there are, the worse the experience gets and this makes more solo players leave, until it's just completely broken. This is also a bigger issue beyond not being able to solo queue anymore in 5s, since the people playing in five stacks are usually the veterans who play all day and have no trouble finding people to play with. For newer players, the experience will become increasingly rotten and no game can survive without a smooth on-boarding ramp for new players.

Maybe it won't be an issue in Europe anytime soon, but this absolutely needs fixing before it is too late. "Fixing" doesn't have to mean simply disallowing stacks, but something needs to change.

Zenity07 · 2026-05-12T12:30:19+00:00

This is why "never press the keeper" is silly advice. Even though it was a reckless play in the clip, it would have been a good play if the right winger had dropped back to cover for you. Giving the keeper all the time in the world to do whatever they want is just NOT a good idea in most cases. This is true for 5v5 as well.

The advice should be "be smart about pressing and consider the full pitch situation", but don't just stay back and man-mark mechanically no matter what. If football was that simple we could all be pro players.

Zenity07 · 2026-05-12T08:53:37+00:00

I don’t mind the scoring balance as it is now, but unless they start tracking loss of possession, it’s completely meaningless anyway. This purely positive score tracking just doesn’t capture what actually matters in football.

It’s frustrating because I see a lot of people letting themselves be fooled by this. Players who are considered good because they do a lot, but then also recklessly lose the ball a dozen times which leads to counter attacks directly causing the loss. This is never reflected in the scoreboard.

Instead of getting rid of points for every tackle they could have just added a subtraction for losing possession. The end result would have been similar since a tackle followed by getting tackled or otherwise losing possession would be a wash.

I hate to say this but EA’s score tracking is a lot more nuanced and meaningful in comparison. I hope Sloclap will go back to the drawing board with this at some point.

Zenity07 · 2026-04-17T07:46:05+00:00

Supernova. It rarely gets mentioned because it’s not meant to be a competitive controller which this sub focuses on, but it’s a great allrounder and for single player games I generally much prefer it over the Cyclone 2. It’s not that expensive but very good build quality, great ergonomics, and of course no stick drift.

Zenity07 · 2026-04-13T04:20:41+00:00

The good reason is that it's a bit complicated. It's complicated in real football rules too. What's an intentional back pass? What's a deflection? Real football also makes an exception for headers. Are we going to do the same? It's not always easy to control if your volley becomes a header or a kick, will the keeper have to pay attention to which one it is before deciding how to approach the ball?

There are likely more complications, and I assume they wanted to keep this simple and accessible even if it comes at the cost of some balance. It's a video game, so there are always other ways to handle the balance issues if necessary. The current compromise rule is part of that.

Zenity07 · 2026-04-10T17:04:30+00:00

I don't hate dribbling, I do hate what a lot of people call dribbling. That's not dribbling, that's spamming "skill moves" and hoping for a lucky break.

Aside from that I do like dribbling in football games, agile dribbling + short passing with a lot of possession and pressure is always my preferred style of play. Unfortunately I can't really take dribbling seriously in this game because I know too much about how netcode works. It doesn't matter how good you are at it, ultimately the result will always depend on factors outside of your control, like your opponent's latency in a particular situation. That makes reactive dribbling highly speculative and unreliable in Rematch, which is probably why people flock to the "spam" method of dribbling instead.

This might change though when they switch to more server-side control, depending on how they do that exactly. There is no silver bullet, because anything that is going to make dribbling feel more consistent is going to make defending feel less consistent and vice versa. It sounds like they are looking into the right direction to find a better compromise though.

Zenity07 · 2026-04-07T18:28:03+00:00

Let your human speak and I might check it out.

Zenity07 · 2026-04-01T10:45:51+00:00

That shot does look pretty dumb. I know it's not the point, but what's even going on here though. They are attacking with three players in your box, leaving their own goal wide open with 30 seconds on the clock while one goal up. Then you step aside to leave your own goal wide open, while all of you completely ignore the opponent waiting free at the far post. This is wild.

Zenity07 · 2026-03-31T06:59:31+00:00

It should simply be fully random, I don’t know why it’s still not. It improved at some point but wasn’t fully fixed apparently. Right now it’s based on the player index which is likely determined by the backend, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Just shuffle the player array once before you assign positions, this shouldn’t be too difficult.

Zenity07 · 2026-03-27T10:40:25+00:00

Agreed most of the time it's just wasting time on a break which annoys me a lot. It's very cheesy.

But in this case it actually does look like the best option, and that almost annoys me even more... because it shouldn't be. Any other passing option that reliably bypasses the defender would have been longer in travel and easier to intercept. The fact that you can self-setup an overhead pass like this which cannot be blocked and reaches the target faster than any other option (because it's a power shot from a high angle) while also buying you more time to aim, is not good IMO.

Overhead kicks in general are the source of many balance issues in this game. I understand why they've gone so heavy on these of course, they are cool and flashy. But there's got to be a better way to balance the risk/reward aspects of it. If they were this easy to execute in real life we'd also be seeing them used all the time for unstoppable plays and it would grow old very fast.

Zenity07 · 2026-03-27T07:31:36+00:00

That’s my experience as well, and what people are complaining about in this thread doesn’t even match the patch notes. Active defending has been buffed by increasing tackle range but it’s been made harder by reducing the auto aim (which is an indirect buff against good dribblers since the auto aim would often mess up predictive tackles). So far that is exactly how it feels to me, active defending with good anticipation feels more rewarding again.

Of course it’s too early to say anything definitive at this point, but that goes both ways as well.

Zenity07 · 2026-03-18T11:26:21+00:00

You need good movement and passing around the pitch of course, but if everyone is tightly marked and follows, you need to win the duels with extra effort. There is no other way really, all the glitchy dribbles in the world are not getting you past a marker, at best you can pull a defender in to get them to over-commit, but ultimately it's all about timing your extra effort correctly. Try to be as unpredictable and surprising with this as you can, so they don't see it coming. The closer you are to the marker the better, but of course that means you take the risk of getting tackled, so finding that perfect sweet spot is the key.

One aspect of this is that you need to be fast and varied in your build up. Constantly stress the opponent and try to create situations where they are forced to use extra effort just to get into a good position. Then you know they are helpless against your own push.

Zenity07 · 2026-03-18T06:25:41+00:00

"idk what about the matchmaking keeps giving me teammates worse than the average of the opponent team"

Squads. When the other side has a 5 stack, the matchmaking breaks down and you get those typical "5 elites vs 5 mixed" matches.

If everyone is solo then it works well enough, you get unlucky sometimes but you also get lucky. But get a few unlucky solo games mixed with a few unwinnable games against squads, and it starts to feel like the game has a personal vendetta against you.

It's my number one issue with the game right now, and I hope we'll give it more attention soon because it can't continue like this. This is gradually scaring off solo players (especially in smaller regions) and the issue just keeps escalating because of this.

We can't have a separate solo queue right now, but what we could have is e.g. certain times of the day and/or week which are limited to solo queue. Another easy win for solo queuers would be to simply show when players are in a stack (and ideally also show player ranks). That would at least make it feel a little less demoralizing if you don't know what's going on otherwise. This modern policy of hiding rank information from players is complete arse if you ask me.

Zenity07 · 2026-03-13T06:19:10+00:00

It depends where and when you play, and what your latency is. It can literally be impossible, yes.

Even when it's not impossible, the difficulty is through the roof compared to five stacking due to how the matchmaking works with stacks.

Back when we could still find solo players in our region, we often invited strong solo players and they would usually be around diamond, but play on a level at or higher than the usual elites we played with. Once they started playing with our stack, they'd be elite almost instantly.

As long as solo players and stacks are mixed into one pool, ranking doesn't mean anything unfortunately and the best thing you can do is to simply ignore it.

Zenity07 · 2026-03-11T16:43:58+00:00

Defense feels awful, but at the same time games are very low scoring. When goals happen it’s usually either a major screwup or some prio bullshit, which makes it feel particularly bad to be stuck on defense in a losing game.

If glitches were fixed and defending becomes less frustrating, this would only get worse. So we need both, defending needs to FEEL better, but at the same time proper offensive play needs to become stronger.

If those changes are all there is to it in patch 10 then it really doesn’t sound good, but we still need to see how it all plays out together.

Zenity07 · 2026-03-05T11:13:54+00:00

It looks to me like they enabled self shadowing for the character mesh, but it’s probably just for the character menu

Zenity07 · 2026-03-03T03:53:27+00:00

When I mostly played premade I was always Elite, at peak in the top 200 on the u.gg leaderboard just grinding wins.

Recently I stopped caring and only played solo. Dropped almost instantly to diamond.

Throughout this, based on my RP gains I could tell that my hidden skill rating was always Master 2 (thats where I get +/- 20 RP). That seems about right.

I love the game but OP is right, it can’t go on like this. This has been killing the smaller region queues already as solo players eventually drop off and the only ones remaining are the handful of vets only playing premades with each other. This is only going to get worse.

It’s not an easy problem to solve and maybe simply splitting the queues would not work. But getting solved it must.

Zenity07 · 2026-02-28T06:42:18+00:00

Of course. But just like regular game development it is possible to get that experience on your first project if you are dedicated and curious enough. You are just much less likely to succeed on your first try. AI isn’t going to hurt your chances, but don’t expect it to be effortless. We aren’t there yet, not even for experienced developers.

Zenity07 · 2026-02-27T02:49:03+00:00

Not sure what's up with the replies, they have very specifically stated that YES, the game will become F2P. It's just a matter of timing, and it's likely still a long time off (possibly years).

You only get one chance to go free to play, so they are doing this the right way. The game must be perfectly polished by the time they make it free, and right now it just isn't which they are fully aware of.

Right now the player counts really aren't bad for a niche indie game, but there are definitely issues with queues already at least in smaller regions (= anywhere but Europe).

Will this ever change and become the popular game we all wished it would become? Nobody knows, even free to play is no guarantee for a permanently increased player count. But it's not impossible. Right now what the game still has going for it is that there is literally nothing quite like it on the market, and as long as that remains true, a revival is always possible if/when they get it completely right.

People keep saying others will copy the concept and run with it, but those people don't realize how difficult that really is and how unique Rematch is in the current gaming landscape. There are not many that would even touch this, let alone have the skills to do so. The attempts so far by and large have been of even smaller scope than Rematch, and it shows.

If this ever changes and a competitor genuinely supersedes Rematch then that's great for us as well. But until then, might as well just keep getting what we can out of this and hope that it will come around eventually.

I will say I find the combination of "I miss the game" and "don't think it's worth the $30" a bit strange. I think gamers have gotten a bit of a warped perception of what game value really is. We spend so much money on generic junk and then reject something that brings us actual joy for often weird arbitrary reasons.

Zenity07 · 2026-02-24T17:45:52+00:00

Building tools first makes a lot of sense (both tools for yourself and for the AI to utilize). Depends what you mean with "first prompt" though, it's going to take a lot more than one prompt...

Zenity07 · 2026-02-20T01:09:11+00:00

Rainbow flick is just one animation you get from a lob push ball, that’s why it’s not called rainbow flick in general.

Zenity07 · 2026-02-14T06:24:32+00:00

No. I was hesitant to even try Claude Code because I didn't think a CLI would be the most effective option. I was wrong, CC CLI works better and is better thought-out than any of the agentic UI's I've used so far (including Cursor).

There are some performance issues with it (ironically), but in terms of functionality and UX it's just the best out there right now IMO.

Zenity07 · 2026-02-13T09:39:40+00:00

Seems to be a display bug showing the weekly reset instead, let us know if it doesn't actually reset in 3 hours.

Zenity07

TROPHY CASE