Following the announcement of the Catizen airdrop allocation, some players expressed dissatisfaction with the uncommunicated changes to the token distribution model and allocation criteria. Developer Pluto Studio acknowledged that they failed to disclose the changes in standards beforehand. After the CATI airdrop interface opened, several players expressed their disappointment on X, as they received less than their expected rewards.

Furthermore, the Catizen team had previously stated that players' vKitty earnings rate in the game would be the primary determinant of airdrop allocation. However, early Sunday morning, after revealing the airdrop allocation to players, Pluto stated that they had actually changed the airdrop design after discovering that some players were using artificial means to increase their earnings. They explained: "During our review of the data for this CATI airdrop, we discovered that many bot accounts were exploiting this publicly known rule by using scripts to increase their vKitty earnings rate, attempting to gain a large amount of CATI tokens.

Following the initial airdrop criteria would severely harm the interests of genuine players and community supporters. Therefore, the airdrop criteria were adjusted to minimize vKitty earnings speed, focusing instead on ‘factors that more accurately reflect real player activity, such as on-chain interactions, task completion, fish coin purchase and consumption’." Decrypt reached out to Pluto Studio for comment, including why they did not ban the cheating players but instead changed the criteria for all users, but received no immediate response.