The
Sony America connection and lag patch is now
live. For those of you in North America (as well the rest of the community served by Sony America), turn on you PS3’s, fire up Fat Princess and you should get the update.
Europe is coming next week. As noted in the previous blog entry, Titan Studios had nothing to do with this timing. Before you skewer us, please read the previous post.
Patch Notes
Our primary focus with this patch was to improve connections and reduce lag. We also addressed the AoE scoring exploits, a few other scoring imbalances, and made minor tweaks that should reduce stalemates. Here are the details:
- The server selection heuristic has been modified so that ping time has been more heavily weighted when selecting potential matches. This will result in players being connected to games in such a way that game population and ping are more evenly weighted.
- Newly hosted servers will be more attractive to potential clients and thus fill up more quickly. The change will also better distribute connection attempts among servers and thus reduce failed attempts.
- Potential servers will be given less time to respond to ping requests. This should speed up that portion of the connection process.
- Selected servers will be given more time to establish a connection, resulting in fewer failed attempts.
- The connection code is less sensitive to packets coming back out of order. This was a cause of failed connections.
- Ice Mage and Dark Priest AoE scoring has been adjusted from 10 points to 2 points per enemy affected.
- Non-worker resource return has been reduced from 20 points to 10 points.
- Feeding the princess has been reduced from 20 points to 15 points.
- Castle door hit points have been reduced slightly from 30 to 25.
- The Princess’ calorie burn has been increased at weight stage 2, 3, and 4. Calorie burn was previously 2 per second at all stages. Stage 2 is now 4 per second, stage 3 is 8 per second, and stage 4 is 12 per second.
How To Play the Patch
Our experience using the patch is that successful connections occur more than 75% of the time on the first attempt. Selected servers are more fit, and so lag is reduced. A number of other problems attributed to lag are, as a result, also less prevalent. We expect server host migration to work more consistently.
The community will have to find a new balance in terms of host versus player distribution. Because of changes to the heuristic, there may be more servers with a moderate population of players, and fewer servers that are nearly full or nearly empty. The ideal ratio of servers to players is probably about 4 servers per 100 players. Unless you have a spectacular connection, try finding a game or jumping in first. If games are full and you’re having a hard time connecting, and you have a decent connections and a good ISP – by all means host. If your connection is moderate or poor, though, you won’t have many joiners. As with any peer to peer game – many empty games means too many hosts. Few, full games means not enough.
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