CATAN – World Explorers is shutting down
CATANFiona
Administrator Posts: 448 Admin
Explorers,
After a year of exploring the world together, we are announcing today that CATAN – World Explorers will not be rolling out to more countries and instead we will be winding down the game over the coming months. The team thanks all of you, our dedicated players, for your feedback and your fun.
CATAN – World Explorers will sunset on November 18th, 2021, 7am UTC. This means that the game will not be available to play any more after this date and all development on it will be halted. Later today, we will be taking the game down from the App Store and removing real-money purchases from the Shop. We want to have some final fun in our last few seasons; we plan on increasing bonuses to make the most of the remaining weeks!
The team originally set out to build a game that turned the world into a CATAN gameboard. We had a vision for trading, harvesting, and building up the world in seasonal play and resetting the board each month, just like you do for each new game you play at home. But trying to adapt such a well-designed board game to a global, location-based Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game was a tough challenge. We’re so proud of the game we made, however we got a little too complicated and a little too far from the original CATAN game. The work and knowledge that we learned working on this game is not lost and we’re already working hard on more games for the future!
To everyone in the CATAN – World Explorers community that joined us for this adventure, we’re so thankful for your dedication, support, and detailed feedback! We hope to see you again soon.
The CATAN – World Explorers team has learned a lot since we kicked off our soft launch beta in early July 2020. A lot can be attributed to this community of dedicated beta players, who rigorously reported every bug, provided key feedback, and always reminded us why we made this game in the first place: for a community of dedicated fans. We want to thank everyone who supported this game!
Here you can find some GIFs and Stickers that we had planned to release for the launch of this game. They are also available on social media apps like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram – just type CatanWE in the search bar. We hope they will be something that you enjoy and share during the last two seasons. We are already thinking about how to spice up the final season for all of you.
Thank you for being the best community we could imagine!
Yours,
The CATAN – World Explorers Team
What happens to my in-app purchases?
You’ll still be able to spend your remaining Gold balance before the end of the game. We have some gameplay ideas that we are planning will make the next few months of gameplay really exciting! We’re also going to cut prices of items in the shop so that players have the full opportunity to enjoy your Gold balance in the next few months.
If you would like to use your currency in Pokémon GO, you can transfer your unused Gold balance to Pokémon GO. Please contact support before November 1st to request this balance transfer.
Comments
Thanks for all the hard work from the devs and admin! It has been great fun while it lasted.
See you all around!
Ouch that aucks, the gameplay was amazing however a question
these mechanics, would you reconsider reusing them for a different franchise?
buildings, rolls trading and resource are pretty common amongst other games not just Catan.
The stickers look great😃
Shattered that Catan is not being continued. Such an amazing game. Such great ideas. Season reset is the best concept ever.
That is incredibly disappointing. There was an opportunity to grow. Besides the recent update that broke a lot, I was slowly enjoying it more, week on week.
The divergence from the board game didn't help.
Very sorry to hear about the future of World Explorers @CATANFiona
I was not a fan of the season quest, only because I only finished one 😉 but I did love the challenge it posed all the same.
I am going to miss getting out and about and in particular, learning new things about my town. Eg. There is a plaque at a park in Levin that I didn't know was there until it became a settlement one season. I found the same when playing in my home town.
I started playing season 2 and have been an avid fan ever since. I can't wait to see what new adventure you have instore for us. I am not a Pokemon Go fan nor do I like Harry Potter.
Thank you team for all you have done.
@ReplacedknifeNZ if you love to explore, imwould suggest Ingress if you hasnt tried it yet.
Commiserations to ALL the team and all behind the scenes. It was as a great concept will be sad to see it go.
wish you all the best for any future endeavours
@CATANFiona if it makes you feel better.
My motivation was the scoreboard and the season quest. Just finished the season quest today.
But I won't go until the server is turned off.
You're not gonna pry the game from me!
Some of us are dedicated, despite what we might say on the forum. Probably the takeaway is that we are passionate about the game.
Pokemon was never my thing, might have to try something else. Ingress could be a possibility once Catan shuts. Thanks for giving it a go team and all the best with future ideas!
Still in shock about this....
what i loved the most were the Quests and resource farming for trades.
Getting catanians to 5 hearts is my main motivation
the personal and golden settlements are nice touch alongside the season resets, that what made this game special and unique
will,play til the end.
oh btw. Will you mention the story about Catan and Nerd ninja as parting gift for us passionate players to learn/read about ? @CATANdominik @CATANFiona @CATANEir @AjanHukka
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
@CATANFiona @CATANEir
@CATANdominik think you all need to refocus.
That means, fix the current couple of issues. Friends and Raids.
Then announce a short break, say a month, the whole team, take a break/holiday.
Us passionate players will still be playing, even if there is no season quest, just need a heads up doing so.
Come back to finalise the global launch.
Is this worth considering?
Sure you want more features, though more is less. Those new features can come out later, not important.
Hey @CATANFiona, thanks for sharing. There's obviously a few devastated players around... This is pretty crushing to hear as players, and i'm sure much more so for you and the development team...
Can you shed any insight as to what happened? Funders pulled out due to poor take up? not enough fabled ticket sales? Proof of concept not sufficient?
It seems to me that ALOT of development work went into this... years worth... and to pull the pin only a few weeks after the monetisation part got released (Fabled buildings & Balloons), suggests that there's more to the story!
Where are the team going next? are they going to work on any other Niantic concepts?
haha, love your style @Grogyan . Do you really think they'd announce to the world that they're shutting down the game... but then a day later make this announcement:
"Dear World... we were going to shut down the game, but a player on our forum convinced us that all we really needed was a month off... so we're going to do that instead, and then launch globally!"
You are officially Dreaming!
Such devastating news 😱
The basic game principles of CWE really got me hooked, so much more than boring HPWU and PoGo.
Season refresh is a great system and I am a big fan of resource trading and building mechanics.
Was the perfect partner game to Ingress exploring waypoints.
Agree on the getting overcomplicated in some areas.
Was SO looking forward to spending all my saved RP???!??? Please give us something to spend it on now!
My family are really going to miss this game 😩
Well it was just a dream
SO sad to hear this news, I have been having a great time with the game.
" we got a little too complicated and a little too far from the original CATAN game." @CATANFiona ,@CATANnate I don't believe either of those are true. Catan has many many variants including a dice game. Catan isn't a single game its style of game, there is plenty of room for artistic expression and CWE was doing that really well. Like Wind I hope these mechanics make it into a different MMO game.
"The divergence from the board game didn't help." @Grogyan as far as I can tell you are the only player who seems to care about that. I have read anything from anyone else here, or elsewhere online, complaining about the game play.
I think you'll find a lot of discussions around many aspects about the divergence from the board game not working out.
Robber being one. Play the board game, a lot, and Understanding what that one game piece does to the game. Then see what wasn't happening in World Explorers. The robber is essentially a regulator, to regulate pace of the game. Obviously it would have to be tailored for World Explorers in a different way, but to achieve the same goal.
Maybe release the game to the rest of the world before end?
Can you explain really what was going on there? Why to develop a game for years and finally just dropping it? It was basically ready for global launch for ages and would’ve made lots of money. This sounds really bizarre. 🙈
And why not to actually release the game to see how well it does?
Can we at least preserve the player profile, level & achievements somewhere central, like a Niantic profile?
#foreverbronze
This game is already better than the other Niantic games even outside beta. 🙈
Thank you for the brief and enjoyable game.
R.I.P
Sad news! Ingress is great though. Join the Resistance today ( Blue team ) ☺️
Very sad news I have been enjoying playing the game since the beginning.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to play and good luck in any future endeavors
Sad news, but not entirely unexpected, it was clear something was up when feedback on the forum pretty much disappeared. By "overcomplicated" I'm guessing the code architecture got a bit too messy - the prevalence of unfixed critical bugs suggests the same. The actual game was relatively simple to play, though possibly difficult to balance (e.g. buildings in golden settlement got so expensive you'd need to play for years to get the investment back, gold maybe too easy to obtain etc)
In the end though, there probably just wasn't enough take up. Judging by global/personal VP scores (possibly not reliable and there are differences in how they're calculated ) I'm probably responsible for about 1% of VP for Eagles globally, and even though I play every day I've never been a grinder. In most games I wouldn't expect to be responsible for 1% of my team's score in my city.
Commiserations to the team, I thought you had some nice ideas, and I hope none of you are out of a job.
Sad news. I note that you say you can only transfer Gold balance to Pokémon GO? How come not to CMU on Ingress or Gold on Wizards Unite.
It’s a shame most never got to experience the game but it did seem held off on global launch for way way too long.
Hope you’re all still able to keep doing great work elsewhere. What happens with the forums? Are they kept as a time capsule or just deleted?
could you release the beta worldwide then for those who did not even got to try it ? 😅