Colonist.io Reviews 32

To the Colonist.io team,

As a regular and passionate player of your platform, I am writing to express my serious concern—and now, my conviction—that your dice algorithm is not random and that it deliberately manipulates game outcomes to prevent certain players from winning, especially when they are nearing their personal best ranking.

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⚠️ Evidence of rigged gameplay and artificial balancing

Manipulated dice outcomes:
The theoretical probabilities of 2D6 rolls are well established (binomial distribution). Yet after analyzing data from over 150 games, I have recorded significant and repeated deviations:
High-frequency tiles (like 6 and 8) go unrolled for 20+ turns,
The “7” appears far more often than the expected 16.67%, especially when a player nears 8–9 points,
Most tellingly: the leading player consistently gets denied key resources via unfavorable dice rolls, while opponents receive sudden windfalls.
Anti-win mechanics:
When a player nears their all-time high ranking, dice results become systematically unfavorable—even with strong placements. Meanwhile, opponents seem to be favored by a “catch-up” mechanic. This pattern strongly suggests a hidden balancing algorithm that hinders victory for the leading player.
Systematic, reproducible, statistically improbable:
These patterns are not anecdotal. They recur with enough consistency to rule out coincidence, suggesting an engineered outcome, not pure chance.

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💥 Consequences of this practice

You turn a game of strategy and probability into a frustrating and unfair experience,
You compromise the credibility of your Elo ranking system,
You undermine user trust, which depends entirely on the assumption of algorithmic neutrality and statistical fairness.

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❓Three questions for your team

Has your dice algorithm ever been publicly audited or peer-reviewed by an independent third party?
Are you using balancing logic or rubber-banding techniques (like in some competitive video games)?
Can you provide technical proof (source code, server logs, or large-scale statistics) that dice rolls are purely random?

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🧨 Final warning

Unless you provide a clear and transparent answer, I reserve the right to:
Publicly publish my statistical analysis across gaming communities and review platforms,
Expose the pattern of manipulated dice rolls with supporting data,
Warn fellow players of what I believe is hidden cheating through a biased algorithm that ruins fair play and damages the game’s long-term reputation.

You will likely refer to the standard statistical defense: "variance is normal in small sample sizes." This would be a reasonable explanation if we were talking about isolated or random games. But here, we are observing contextual, targeted, and recurring patterns—always affecting the leading player or the one nearing a personal Elo record.
Specifically:

• These patterns are not random: they are systematic and contextual,
• They do not impact all players equally, but disproportionately punish the frontrunner,
• They occur at very specific moments (when the player reaches 8–10 points, or is about to break a record), which is statistically improbable without some form of programmed bias,
• If you have nothing to hide, publish your dice roll logs or codebase (even anonymized). Transparency is the only way to dismiss this concern.
•
Without that transparency, invoking statistical randomness is no longer valid. It becomes a smokescreen to deflect from the presence of algorithmic rubber-banding.

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This issue must be taken seriously. A competitive game platform cannot survive without full player trust in the neutrality and randomness of its mechanics.
I expect a transparent and documented response.

Sincerely,

Williams Davis Roulance

The interface is good.
However, everything is ruined by the player interactions in the chat and their behaviors toward a given player. Rematched with a person(s) from the last game? They play against you even if their life depended on it. The block you, they steal from you even when you are not a threat (in the lead/have a good distribution). The reports seem to be not reviewed.
Last, but not least, the dice are biased. In one game I had 5 8 10 and all game I was getting pretty much nothing from them, when they have high chances to be rolled.
Also, let's not forget the paywalls and perhaps the bias that comes from them, as they favor paid players.

a totally biased catan game. the random rolls. are just a sham. a sampling of 100 games revealed insights where the game favors paid members more. never seen a 12 roll more than 6, 8,9 5 in games where paid members have settlements capitalizing the same.

Good interface. Flawless functioning. Nice options.
All to be ruined by a rigged dice algorithm that they keep claiming is fair and random but has very clear patterns that is always for / against a single player.

The platform functions well enough but the prices for the extra content are just outrageous. If I want to switch up some things to keep the game fresh and interesting (like adding more players and playing on all the other maps/expansions) I have to pay at least 180 $ per year. I haven't spend near as much money on some of the best games ever made. This is just ridiculous.

Too many cheaters! It ruins everything! It's horrible when people cheat because they pretty much spit in your face with the toxic things they say in the chat. They know they'll get away with it as you can see in the history there is loads of games where they cheat and nothing gets done about it. I've reported so many games i have lost count but nothing happens as far as I can tell. You don't even get your karma restored because who wants to sit through a game like that so you exit and having a lower karma which means that the nicer good people that used to be on the site end up getting kicked off because they think you are a quitter. There are quitters with low karma too and that's really lame because they often quit near the start of the game and then you have to wait ages for the now zombie bot to make a move. It's completely ridiculous! There's also lots of bugs on the site which makes it really annoying. There aren't enough short cut keys and the one that there is to skip your turn doesn't always work. Don't bother playing the game with bots as the hardest ones are just a walk over with little intelligence and I have won many times with 10 points to their 2 points (and you start on 2) in a one on one battle and I'm an average player. Some other things that are annoying with the site is that when you join a game, the host may have set the point limits to some ridiculous number that means nobody can win or changed some setting to something unexpected so you have to scroll down to check everything as once the game starts its not uncommon for people to be surprised by things as its not displayed. I could ramble on and on about the many problems but the worst is just the attitude of people in the chat and the obvious swearing even if it is kind of hidden by missing letters out or misspelling and nasty things are often said like getting called an idiot etc. I wish they'd just get rid of the chat because it adds nothing. You also get people that give up and rather than quitting because they don't want to lose karma they just give all there cards away to someone for one card and then you get the people that accept these trades and it ruins the game that way. It's a frustrating game anyways but with all these other frustrations on top, it gets a bit much. Also, I don't know how this site is so similar to the official Catan game and they get away with copying so much of it. I'm sure there's more things to rant about but you get the picture