Catan Universe News

Hi Catanians,

After the holidays, we want to give you an update on what we are working
on this week and what will be the next steps we are taking to resolve known
issues with the game.

Week Dec 26th - Jan 1st: Our QA team (quality assurance team) went
through your feedback and based on that intensified further testing on the
servers, also by playing games with the community. We were able to retrace
reported issues and forwarded them to our development team. The main issues we saw mostly related to handing over turns, both to other clients and/or with the AI not properly replacing other users.

That is causing further consequential errors you are experiencing.
We also tracked other issues in online games, especially in the setup
phase of games. All these are being addressed with the highest
priority by the dev team.

Week Jan 2nd - Jan 8th: The dev team is back at full strength to keep on
working on the above-mentioned issues. It is our highest priority to make
online games as enjoyable to you as they have been. The team knows what systems
they will work on to resolve these issues thanks to the work of the QA team and
your continued feedback.

Another reported issue (especially by iOS users, who had to log in again
after switching between apps) is one symptom of online games not restarting as
intended when a player is shortly disconnecting from the servers. This is due
to ported “old” code not working as intended and expected on the new infrastructure.
We will continue to adapt or rewrite existing code for fixing this and
other issues. We are confident that once these core issues are
resolved, we will see significant progress in improving of the online gaming
service.

We are personally very disappointed that despite all of our efforts in
the last months, we were and are facing unforeseen issues with components that
are not performing as expected on the new platform. Regrettably, these were not
foreseeable and/or we were not able to replicate them on the test systems, as
they are limited to the live environment.

We are committed to working on resolving these issues as soon as
possible and ask for your understanding that the core team is absolutely
focused on this and we will limit most interaction via social media on identifying
and resolving bugs for the time being.

As always, we want to thank you for your patience and constructive feedback.

We also want to encourage those of you who might be missing in-app purchases
after the migration to reach out to our support team ([email protected]). We will find solutions for these sorts of issues together!

Hi Catanians,


in this week's Developer Update we want to give you some insights on the impact of the changes we introduced last week and we will provide you with an overview of what to expect in the coming weeks.

Please note that due to the holiday season we won´t be able to post a developer update next week. But we will be back on Jan 3rd with more info regarding our next moves to resolve known issues with the game.

Week Dec. 12th - 18th

This week we focused on releasing the client update alongside backend updates which heavily focussed on matchmaking and increasing the overall performance of our database. The client update also included a fix for display issues on macOS devices. MacOS users now can load the game scene again. We also saw the number of games being played on our platform increase.

Our metrics show an improvement in the database CPU usage after we released a backend update on Dec 13th.




This massive drop now gives us the breathing room we need to have a much more stable system overall. Based on your feedback we saw that these changes did lead to a noticeable improvement on your end as well. We are happy to hear that. Of course, we are aware that there are still issues and we will address those. We stand by that and won´t stop until the game works as you expect it.


Weeks Dec 18th - Jan 1st

Our team is analyzing your feedback and logs after the latest changes we introduced.

We are aware of issues with placing board pieces and of users dropping out of games. We are also aware of desynced games and of custom-match lobbies not always working as intended. We also got feedback that a certain number of users are still having issues with matchmaking and that the replacement AI is not working as intended.

Our team is working on fixes for these issues.

Now that we have the computing capacity available due to last week's changes we focus on working out these issues while knowing those aren´t caused by a generally poor-performing database.

Our team will keep monitoring your feedback also in the week after Christmas and we are available to resolve immanent issues with the servers or database. But we won´t be able to introduce code fixes to the backend or client between Dec. 23rd and Jan 2nd.

We want to thank you for your patience and ongoing feedback. It helps us a lot.

The matchmaking for Automatches and Freematches will now wait longer for all players to get matched properly, resulting in fewer failed attempts

The Steam version will now continue to run when you switch to another window/desktop

The macOS Version will now properly load the in-game scene

The iOS version won´t display an error message about missing push notification support on launch


For further info about our ongoing efforts to resolve issues with the game please see our weekly developer updates

Matchmaking for Automatch and Freematch is now more robust to ensuring Catanians get into matches more reliable

Hi Catanians,

in this week's developer update we want to talk about the progress we made last week and what you can expect this week.

Last week Dec 5th - Dec 11th


Our team focussed on implementing and testing the client update, which concentrates on matchmaking. The clients will get more time to process matchmaking requests and therefore they should be more reliable. We tested the changes on all the platforms we offer Catan Universe on. We also added multiple fixes to the backend that are also focused on matchmaking itself.

Our team also started to work on improvements for the matches themselves. We saw them being slow, unresponsive, and overall lacking performance causing to often display a “reconnecting” message.

This week Dec 12th - Dec 18th

The builds for the clients have been submitted to the stores but unfortunately, the GooglePlay Store hasn´t approved the version yet.

In our effort to make a noticeable change for all of our Catanians, we will have to wait until the CU client was approved by Google before moving forward with the release. We will let you know once the clients are ready to download.

Our team on the other hand finished their work on the backend improvements for the matches we mentioned above. These changes will be published today on Dec13th. We will monitor the changes closely throughout the rest of the week.

Please note that when we publish these backend changes your running match might restart.