Dear Catanians,

Our team is now entirely back in the office and is working full speed on resolving the issues you reported to us during the past weeks. We want to give you an outline of what we are working on and how we plan to resolve the known issues.

But first:

We have heard your feedback loud and clear and we are doing everything we can to tackle the current issues as fast as possible. We want Catan Universe to always be fun again and we want to thank you for your patience and understanding in the current situation.

The actions we take:

The first action we will take is to change the way we will deduct Elo/Karma if a game fails to initialize currently. After the next patch (1.8.5) matches won´t get counted to your Elo/Karma if something goes wrong during the initialization. Since Catan Universe is a multiplatform game, there will always be the chance of one client dropping at that critical stage. To amend these circumstances we will apply the mentioned changes. You can expect the Hotfix within the next 2 weeks.

In order to resolve the reported issues while initiating games, our development team will rework and restructure the entire process. The goal is to have a reliable system even in times of very high demand on our servers. We are considering this restructuring (and recoding) as the only way to resolve the issues sustainably.

Unfortunately, undertaking such measurements needs time. At the moment we are looking at 4 weeks of coding for the new and improved matchmaking system followed by a thorough testing phase with all our resources allocated to this. The rework of the matchmaking is of the highest priority to us and we will, therefore, postpone further development of the game for the time being.

We are also in close contact with our server provider in order to further optimize the communication between our game and their infrastructure so that general server issues will occur way less often.

As we announced a while back, there will be a second Cities and Knights Season once the new patch is released. This Season will have no entrance fee. This means you will be able to play again for the prices you might not have won due to technical errors.

We want to thank all of you providing us with solid feedback over the past weeks, helping us to identify the issue. We do take the current situation very seriously and we want to let you know that all your feedback is read and taken into account.

We will keep you updated on the development process. Please stay tuned in the weeks to come.

The CATAN Universe Team