tiny harness
If you are a frequent player of Catan Universe, you should not be surprised by the disastrous server migration process and ongoing issues and excuses provided by the team trying to support Catan.
The mistakes start with a broken business model. You usually get what you pay for. Unfortunately, the Catan Universe team set itself up for failure with the wrong business model. Yes, they have delivered cheap fun for many users, but they need to better monetize the passion, time investment, and commitment of Catan players. This is a critical business decision failure that leaves them unable to fund the expensive engineering talent needed to support their user growth and future roadmap.
They have underqualified, and likely too few, software engineers familiar with large-scale game design and modern database architecture. They have some gameplay design talent for certain, but not the right leadership or front-line engineering talent needed for the current situation or an enduring future for the game.
Fix: The business model needs a free tier AND a subscription tier, along with a dynamic marketplace for in-game content.
Fix: They could be acquired by a more experienced game portfolio company, but acquisition transitions are a tough pill to survive, and re-architecture and necessary hiring/firing decisions are difficult in the unsettled corporate environment that follows most acquisitions.
Fix: They need a senior engineering AND business leader to lead them forward.
If they can survive the current debacle, the entire platform needs a redesign, not an ongoing evolution of the current platform with its broken state and connectivity management, queuing system, and numerous game algorithms and scripts that are obviously not designed for the medium-scale current success of the game.
I wish them well and want them to survive and thrive. But the writing was on the wall a long time ago that the current engineering and design failure was inevitable.
-kevlar
woeful lotus
sick jungle
final hull