It's even worse!

4 Apr 2021 0118h

I’ve uninstalled Catan World Explorers for over a month now, and it has been more entertaining reading about the new bugs than actually playing the game and being tortured by the horrendous UI.

It comes as no surprise that more problems surfaced in the month I quit.

You spin me right round, baby right round

Before I stopped playing, a common complaint was with the in-game auto-compass randomly toggling on. An update announced a fix to the compass (oh wow, finally change logs!)…except that it doesn’t fix the problem and makes it worse instead:

Scoring

There was a change of scoring regions, which resulted in a lot of settlements not scoring for their local region and the VPs scored not counting towards any region at all. The “fix” for this was to change to national scoring, except that most settlements were not scoring again.

Despite many players reporting this issue, there was never a satisfactory answer/fix given. Instead, it was announced that the bonus VPs for daily hard quests were not added previously, and suddenly this was added as a lump sum to the Eagles. This led to a few questions:

1. Given that the bonus VP is dependent on the score difference daily, adding the bonuses as calculated when the VP disparity is largest means that this bonus was overcompensated.

2. The bonus VPs more than doubled the Eagles score, which has led to players (of all factions) questioning about the balance of the bonus VPs. Some Eagle players have openly called this  “patronising”.

3. No one knows if this compensatory VP was actually calculated correctly, or again, calculated incorrectly.

This, along with the scoring disparities at settlement and national level has led to huge distrust of the scores.

Friends List

A few weeks back, Niantic decided that every player should have a unified friends list in ALL Niantic titles, and “merged” the friends list across all games. This led to a few consequences:

1. Players are automatically friends across all games with anybody who’s originally a friend in any Niantic game. This meant that your Pokemon friends (say) can now see what you are doing in Harry Potter Wizards Unite. Needless to say this is a huge privacy breach.

2. Players who originally had close to the friends limit, saw some of their friends list being overwritten in the “merge” due to exceeding the limit.

Needless to say, there were a lot of unhappy players as this happened overnight without any prior warning/communication.

This is not a Catan specific issue, but really highlights the points about Niantic and their poor management.