I don't know what's happened but it looks like Catch The Ark has been pulled from the UK AppStore, not sure if it has also happened on the US AppStore.
No, not strange. They discovered they had a critical bug in this latest version which could insert an incorrect line of data into your save file and then you lost everything, like me and a number of others did. It's not strange to pull a game which cannot save its data if you don't expect a horde of villagers with torches and pitchforks to come looking for Instead they just have those of us who paid for the game when it had a near but not quite freemium like upgrade system mad that it's now clearly going to be free all the time anyhow since they've tripled the price of the coin doubler and added an enormous amount of grinding to an already grind heavy runner. And then it ate our data so if we wanted to play it, we have no choice but to start from scratch with the full out freemium version, yay!
Yep I bought this when it first came out. Pretty good fun so I played like crazy to unlock the yellow duck boat. My rank was pretty high. Now with this update my rank is gone and must start from scratch. I originally purchased the coin doubler. Now there's this coin multiplier for $2.99. I tried restoring purchases and it purchased the coin multiplier. When I opened the game again it was locked. I topped up some upgrades with thousands of coins. It did not even save that so they're gone! The price of boats have gone up since the original version so there's a grind fest there. And this game has always on occasion been laggy for me. So I deleted it yesterday and that's that! It's a shame though because the game itself is fun... It's just what it's wrapped in.
Why? I posted already it starts crashing and you will lose all your coins. This game is a grindfest and you would be pissed if you lost all your coins. This last update just basically added a lot of inapps and Chillingo/EA probably cared more about inapps and greed than to playtest this, so what happens? The data gets corrupted and players lose their progress and all coins. So, to anyone that has coins and cares, do not play this at all until the next update. I asked Patrick from Chillingo to help us here in Toucharcade, he does not respond. So sad that Chillingo/EA does not want to help us, but at least they seemed to have pulled the app for now. They chose to basically screw early adopters by making this freemium without even the customary early adopter bonus in coins, make it free fairly soon after launch, add inapps and make the game worse right before it turned freemium, and now do this screwup where early adopters lose all coins and progress for their greed. Thanks Chillingo and EA, and thanks for ruining RR3 too EA, hopefully too you can accidentally erase all our coins in that game too since EA refuses to use Apple's icloud. Warning: do not upgrade or play carch the ark until a new update. Patrick@Chillingo and others from Chillingo/EA, where are you when we need you? So sad what you guys are doing in the name of inapps and greed. Stop changing games inapp structures just so you all make money and our games crash and lose everything. This is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.
Yeah, can't believe they raised inapp prices and boat prices. With the new boat at one and a half million dollars, and the average coins per game at one thousand. It takes over 2000 games or $40 in real money to get that ONE BOAT, great, thanks Chillingo/EA. And thanks too for selling me a premium early adopter a coin doubler for 99 cents and seemingly removing it and adding a $2.99 COIN MULTIPLIER, and doing a restore purchases does not make my coin doubler come back. This is fraud. Unethical, and plain greed. Maybe, if I would tap on that new coin multiplier, it would still give it to me, but man, it is scary to hit that thing in my situtation. Can you imagine argueing with Apple about a refund and Chillingo/EA saying no, we pulled the coin doubler, you actually legitimately bought the COIN MULTIPLIER. Sigh, this really makes me regret buying any Chillingo/EA games lately since they just go free after one month, they don't give early adopters a bonus in coins, they do stupid updates just to add more inapps and don't improve gameplay which is what updates were supposed to be for, of course the updates crash so we lose all coins and inapps anywayz, and am really happy that it seems that I have to buy a new coin multiplier when I purchased the older coin doubler for three times the price. Way to go Chillingo/EA, thanks for the constant updates and freemiums. Nice touch.
How exactly does this save game corruption manifest? I've been playing (got it when it went free) but haven't seen anything unusual. I still have all my coins after about an hours play (on and off).
Yeah... I haven't had any issues with crashing on this one - but the way that they've totally screwed customers here has completely turned me off of Chillingo. It sucks, because one dev/publisher completely ####ing up one game puts all of their other, maybe extremely talented and deserving of support developers in a very bad boat. Then again, if a developer doesn't do any sort of research on the company who publishes their game, maybe they're not worth supporting anyway... No more Chillingo purchases for me.
That's the overriding problem w/ios gaming, aside from apps completely disappearing. Apple lets anything pass as an update, without requiring DETAILED changelogs. So premium games go freemium, ANY games with iaps can be "rebalanced" for the publishers' cash flow at any time, etc. Frankly, most developers/publishers only care about the bottom line, so what's to stop this happening to the vast majority of apps? It's a crock and apple doesn't give a damn because hey... If an app isn't selling anymore, Apple's not getting paid...but they always get a % off of every in-app purchase.
I just wanted to add that the problem was further exacerbated when Apple changed the way "new apps" were listed in the store. Now, the most recently updated apps are at the top of the "new" lists, right along side actual NEW apps. This incentivizes publishers/developers to update every week, for good or for bad. And then you have apps pulled because the publisher decides it isn't making money any more, so why not remove it and publish "app x 2". There needs to be a damned digital consumer backlash against this crap. I'm already part of a class action against Facebook, I wish someone would find a creative lawyer looking to make a name for himself to take Apple to court for their misleading consumer practices. I'm just waiting for one of my 30-50 dollar apps to vanish. Then You'll see anger like you've never seen before.
FYI for any early adopters who are having the crashing problem, losing all coins, or missing inapp coin doubler problems. Write them right away to get your coins back.
Last time this happened, I got a $10 itunes giftcard for all my lost coins. But who knows what will happen here. We will see.
Well I wish you luck..perhaps settle for $100 iTunes card and you become the chief shareholder of Chillingo!
Yeah, that wouldn't be so bad either, but wouldn't even buy 1/4 of the inapps in the game. Do they make a $1000 itunes gc? That would do the trick. Another time, I lost all my coins, the developer gave me unlimited coins (well close to it), so it maybe worth 30 seconds of your time since you played the game alot before. Anywayz, we shall see. I just want back what I had before the update and my coin doubler back.
