The developers chose to overhaul the UI, something no one asked for, while long-standing bugs that the community has repeatedly raised remain unfixed. It’s hard not to conclude that this update was focused primarily on introducing a paywall for free-to-play users rather than improving the actual game experience.

Many major issues that existed before the update are still present :

• Bots remain extremely buggy, with infinite turn timers that often crash games
  
• Bots repeatedly offer the same trade over and over
  
• Bots frequently hoard absurd amounts of resources
  
• Bots disproportionately target the player who most recently placed their first settlement
  
• Rejoin loops still exist and may even be worse than before
  
• Free-to-play matches against online players are now impossible
  
• No longer possible to adjust order in custom matches
  
• New connectivity issues cause players to be stuck in endless rejoin loops with no option to cancel (previously, rejoining could be canceled)
  
• Scenarios are broken: player count limits are ignored (e.g., setting a max of 3–4 players still results in 6-player games)
  
• Players are often disconnected right at the start of matches (or when placing cities)
  
• Dice randomness has been removed, which defeats a core principle of board games: this has already been thoroughly explained by @unclehoot_95623 on Discord (see below)
  
• Avatars are now broken and only move when an action is performed on that player (they worked fine before the update)
  
• The new UI, in my opinion, looks worse than the previous one

And many more...

The developers should prioritize fixing long-standing bugs and improving stability instead of pushing unwanted UI changes that further break the game. Ironically, rolling back this update would resolve many of these issues, but that would also remove the newly added paywall, so that seems unlikely.

As someone who has loved this game for a long time: please listen to the community and fix the game properly. At this point, the only thing keeping it alive is Catan as a core concept. The execution, unfortunately, is severely lacking.

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Why the removal of dice randomness is bad, as explained by UncleHoot (@unclehoot_95623):
In the announcement it said:
🎲 Balanced Dice Mode (Auto Matches)
Adjustments have been made to the dice distribution algorithm
Reduced likelihood of dice roll sequences that the community reported as overly extreme
Designed to maintain randomness while allowing for fairness and smoother gameplay flow

I guess that's good news to the people who have no idea what rolling real dice looks like. To the rest of us, it means this: "The dice didn't come up with the number I wanted, so I rolled them again." This "feature" goes against the heart and soul of every board game out there. You have created a "featue" that disrespects the game.

As someone who used to play a lot of poker, you quickly learn that sometimes "randomness is clumpy." I have been dealt Aces three times in a row. That's not a "bug," it's randomness. When you play thousands of hands, you see weird things. Likewise, in Catan, 12 might come up 3 times in a row. That's what true randomness is all about. Yes, it's unlikely, but it's random. In true randomness, the very unlikely happens. Now? I guess these random things will stop happening? That destroys the spirit of the game itself.

It seems that you've bowed to the pressure of people who love to complain about bad luck and that have no real understanding of mathematics.

I truly hope you will reconsider setting the game back to what it should be: random.

imagine a game which is free-to-play, you enter, make an account, then you are locked behind a paywall to play "free to play", catan, guys are making money of catan, losers

bad