Dear Catanians,
we are currently working full speed on alleviating the problems occurring during the start phase of games in CATAN Universe and we are already testing a version that plays promisingly.
Unfortunately, problems of the kind we're currently having, are very tedious to test since they sometimes do simply not occur during our testing phase.
Today we wanted to provide you with a little context on why this is happening:
Usually, we don't test the beta client on the same server that you folks are playing but instead on an identical version of that server. This has 2 reasons:
To properly test the newest version we have to start 100s of games that we have no intention of ever finishing. Sometimes we just start and close games immediately afterward to see how the game behaves during this phase. Were we to do that on the live servers, it' be no way of ensuring that we'd not be matched with any of you folks.
Most of the time a new client version (1.8.8 -> 1.8.9) needs an updated server software as well and that new software is rarely fully backward compatible. And since running two different instances of server software on the same server creates a myriad of problems in and of itself we opt to test on our test server.
So since we did not have the start phase issues in CATAN Universe 1.8.8 on our testing servers, we first had to create a 1.8.9 version that would work on the current live servers without interfering with your folks playing. We were able to test the first iteration of CATAN Universe 1.8.9 yesterday and we're continuing to test today and tomorrow.
We'll, of course, keep you up to date on how our work is progressing.
Thanks a lot for all of your patience and feedback and we'll see you on the island!