MMR, Matchmaking and Parties

Puck B897 is finally here! It's the biggest update the game has ever seen. After nearly a year of work, this release introduces matchmaking, parties, a full UI overhaul, significant security improvements, and a major wave of bug fixes and stability improvements that followed shortly after. Here's everything that's new:

Matchmaking & Parties

• ELO-based ranked matchmaking with a starting rating of 1000 - queue solo or with your party

• RTT (ping) & ELO-based matching to keep games fair and low-latency

• Set a maximum acceptable ping for matchmaking directly in the game settings

• Cooldowns for match abandonment and failure to join matches

• Full Steam lobby integration - create, disband, and invite friends to parties via the in-game UI or Steam overlay

• Match history tracked on the backend (in-game UI coming in a future update)

Voting & Ranked Progression

• Voting system reworked from the ground up with full matchmaking integration

• New /forfeit (/ff) command to forfeit a match early

• /kick now limited to members of your own team

• Teams that abandon a match are automatically given a loss

• Getting kicked from a match no longer results in a matchmaking cooldown

• MMR gain and loss per match increased for more meaningful ranked progression

UI Overhaul

• Sass integration for a more streamlined development flow going forward

• All UI elements unified for a consistent look across all windows and popups

• Performance improvements for both game clients and dedicated servers

• Server browser filters improved and moved to a dedicated window

• Scoreboard visual improvements

Security

• Steam ID validation on server connection, further validated with the backend

• Automated throttling and banning of backend communication abuse

• Filtered data flow - game clients and servers only receive information relevant to them

• Improved message parsing and error handling for unexpected backend communication

• Improved game chat filter covering Unity rich text and profanity

Modding

• Refactored all mod download and installation logic

• Informational popup listing all required mods when connecting to a server

• Subscriptions, upvotes, and downvotes visible in the confirmation popup and mods management window

• Mod titles are now clickable and open the relevant Steam Workshop page

• Mods that fail to install or are cancelled are now properly disabled

Gameplay & Client Fixes

• Fixed game crashes caused by DirectX 12 - Windows clients now default to DirectX 11

• Special characters now render correctly in the UI, fixing missing characters for most languages (font atlas now generates dynamically)

• Starting warmup while in the FaceOff phase no longer leaves players frozen

• Knocked-down players are now properly reset when prepared for a FaceOff

• Player names now correctly display above heads when the setting is enabled

• Fixed player sticks jittering during replay playback

• Fixed /votestart (/vs) during a replay failing to dispose replay objects

Dedicated Servers

• Ping/RTT server switched from UDP to TCP

• Server now provides detailed state data to the server browser via TCP socket

• Tick rate bumped to 200 for all dedicated servers, including matchmaking servers

• Performance optimizations for dedicated server builds

• Additional CLI arguments for controlling multi-server instances

• Fixed a dedicated server crash when no goal was scored for a prolonged period

Backend

• Fixed infinite resource drain that eventually crashed the backend after server capacity was reached

• Fixed rate limiter falsely triggering on legitimate requests

Build versioning

You might have noticed a big jump in the build number - from B202 all the way to B897. Game client and dedicated server versions are now based on commit count, so that's not a typo! Thank you to everyone who stuck around, reported bugs, and jumped into games right after launch. It means a lot.