Its Fat Tuesday! No better way to spend today than to have some cake and splatter your friends in a good game of Rescue the Princess.  Since the initial launch of FP almost three weeks ago, we have enjoyed jumping into random games with all of you and helping coordinate team efforts to save the Princess and thwart the enemies’ attempt to steal her back!  While many fans have quickly picked up the advanced strategies, we’ve noticed that quite a few people are still unaware of the deeper strategies and gameplay.  Here are some more handy tips to help you in your efforts to fight the good fight.

Great Balls of Fire

When a Mage casts a fireball they actually perform two types of damage. Initially the enemy is hit with impact damage and set on fire, but the majority of damage is caused after the target burns for 3 seconds and receives additional Scorch damage. Charging the Mage’s fireballs increases impact damage, but greatly increases Scorch damage.  The fire Mage’s AOE works in the same way burning and Scorching any enemies in the area.  Enemies who get set on fire must quickly find water to eliminate the scorch damage, or they burn, baby, burn!

WTF?! BoOoOoOM!

Did you know the Mage’s fire AOE will light the fuse of unlit bombs?  If you are a Mage and you see an enemy carrying a bomb, use your AOE to light their fuse and create a spectacular meat firework!

Cool It

Ice Mages can be used in many interesting ways to add new strategies to your team’s attacks.  Their Ice AOE can extinguish burning teammates and can put out the fuse on burning bombs.  Their Ice Shard attack also slows down the enemy’s movement speed, with the duration of the affect increasing with charge time.

Death From Above

Dropping bombs into the Catapult will cause them to light at launch creating devastating air strikes.  Try adding the Chicken Potion to the mix to create a fried chicken air strike of death.  Remember that you can power the Catapult with different launch powers to attack different areas of the map. Use an air strike to blow open the enemy Castle doors..?

Carpet Bomber

The Worker’s bombs are a great way to damage small crowds of enemies or retreat from a deadly advancing Warrior.  Did you know that the Worker’s bombs always perform the same amount of damage regardless of the charge time?  Tap the attack button to release bombs quickly into crowds of enemies or charge the Workers bombs to attack targets from further away.  Jumping or adding movement inertia to bomb attacks makes them fly further.

Clucking Hell!

The Chicken Potion is a hilarious way to incapacitate large groups of enemies, but have you thought of using the potion for offensive attacks?  Try coordinating team Chicken attacks and launching from the Catapult to fly further across the map.  Don’t forget that a Chicken moves very quickly and also disguises your class.  Chickens also jump higher than any other character.

We’ll see you online,

- Titan Dev

Greetings Fat Princess Fans! Woo hoo! It’s Friday and what better time to share a handful of useful FP tips? There are a ton of hidden strategies in the game and so we’ve decided to post a few tidbits here today.  These strategies might help you and your teammates crush your opponents over the weekend.  Stay tuned for more tips coming tomorrow!

Chubby Chasing Champion

Your choice of class greatly affects the maximum movement speed of a carried Princess. The top speed at which the Princess can be carried is based on the maximum movement speed of the class carrying her. It does not matter if you have 10 players escorting the Princess, if she is being carried by a Warrior the group cannot move faster than the Warrior’s top speed.

In addition each teammate escorting the Princess carrier adds a speed boost to the party. The amount of boost provided is dependent on the maximum movement speed of the attaching class. Try adding Warriors to your escort group for slower movement with a strong defense or Workers for a faster get away. Wow what was that streaking blur that just pasted by? Why it was a Villager escorting another Villager carrying the Princess!

Launch me baby one more time!

Have you ever tried launching from a Catapult that is not charged to full power?  Each jump in the Catapult adds a specific amount of power, allowing players to launch themselves and objects to different parts of the map.  Try different Catapult launch powers on each map to create diverse new strategies.

Operation Hot Stuff

Fire buffs are awesome, they add damage to the attacks of both the Ranger and the Warrior.  Have you tried using the Mage’s AOE to set fire to logs to create a mobile fire buff station?  Burning logs will burn for 15 seconds and can be relit multiple times. Burning logs can also be carried without causing any damage.  Try adding fire buffs to your strategies for devastating effects.

Here’s Johnny!

Think you know all the tricks of the Worker? Well they may have another trick up their sleeve. Workers attacks produce the most damage to structures by far.  Need to destroy the enemy Castle doors? Are there large rocks covering secret tunnels? Use the Worker to break down barriers quickly and open the way for your blood thirsty teammates.

OMG! What does the Curse do?

So you probably have an idea of what the Dark Priest’s AOE Curse does, but do you really know?  Well let’s put you out of your misery. The Dark Priest’s curse actually has four incapacitating effects, it will stun the enemy making their controls wobbly, it will prevent the enemy from being healed, it will disable the enemy’s lock-on functionality and it will break and remove any AOE charge the enemy is holding.  Do you want to stop an enemy Dark Priest from draining your teammates? Curse him! Is there an enemy Warrior being healed by 5 Priests? Curse him!

Fat Princess Patch Update!

Fat Princess Patch 1.02 is now live in Asia! Turn on you PS3’s, fire up Fat Princess and you should get the update.  Thanks again to all of you who have been writing to us, we greatly appreciate your patience in waiting for this update.

We are now looking ahead at a release schedule for Patch 1.03 to address the wacky Princess disappearing issue and some additional balance tweaks. Keep feeding us your thoughts and feedback, we are eating it all up!

- Titan Dev

The Sony Europe connection and lag  patch is now live!  We thank you for your amazing patience during these first couple of weeks.  Turn on you PS3’s, fire up Fat Princess and you should get the update.  I’ve added the patch notes below again just so you don’t have to head back to the previous post.

For those in Asian territories, have no fear.  The Asia patch should hit by the end of the week.

1.02 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.

Future Patches & Updates

As we talked about in earlier posts, we are working hard on the next round of issues.  Stay tuned for more information soon and a continued huge thanks for all of the support and feedback we have received.

- Titan Dev

Hello intrepid Fat Princess fans.  I am happy to report that we have found the issue related to trophies, stats and scoreboards.  Not only did we find it, but we think we have it fixed.  This is thanks to detailed bug information provided by many players – but especially Boko577.  Boko, by the way, is ranked number one in Warrior Gladiate.  Fear him.  No word on timing of a fix, but we’ve got it, we’ll test it, and roll it into a future update.

Speaking of Scoreboards

As all but 1,000 of you are no doubt aware, the scoreboards are currently limited to the top 1,000 players.  We are working with Sony to have this cap removed, so all players can see their score.  Just to give fair warning, this will happen with a future update and when it does, all scores will be reset to zero.  This will allow all players to be on the boards and in the race.  BEFORE ANYONE FREAKS OUT: We are working on a way of doing this that will allow you to retain your unlocked Get Fabulous options.  K, NOW FREAK OUT.

To the top 1,000 – You rock.  We’re sorry we have to do this, but we’re confident that you’ll recapture your rightful place at the top.

To everyone else – Those cheating bastard AoE exploiters will now be in your sights.  Crush them.

Just a little humor folks…  Thanks in advance for seeing this as an opportunity to legitimately prove your skillz.  No word on timing yet.

Disappearing Princess

We need your help!  We’re unable to actively reproduce the disappearing princess bug.  If we can’t reproduce it, we can’t fix it.  Yes, we’ve all experienced it, and we think it usually involves the catapult or destructible walls, and it may not happen unless the host has migrated.  Unfortunately, this is one of those things that requires a wicked cocktail of factors in order to manifest, and (usually) fortunately, in the safe, protected confines of the Titan Studios world HQ, said wicked cocktail does not exist.

Senseless rhetoric aside, we would like to appeal to you, the community to help us track her down.  If you are in a game, and the princess disappears, we would greatly appreciate it if you could take a photo or screen grab of the mini-map, the score board, and the location on the map where she is supposed to be, including the UI, describe the circumstances under which it happened, and send it all to:

FatPrincess@TitanStudios.com

Please write a Fat Princess is Missing subject line.  Feel free to be clever.  Anyway – the person or people that give us the info that help us track her down will get special mention.  Maybe something more.

Warrior Tweak

With the noted exception of Boko577, the warrior is not quite crushing enemies as much as we’d like.  There’s been a lot of discussion and consideration, and we’ve decided to tweak the warrior a bit to restore her (or his! – see how PC that was?) glory in the Fat Princess ecosystem.  We’ll detail the changes at a later date.  No word on timing.

Sony Europe Patch

Word ’round the campfire: Coming very soon…!

Now that it’s been live for more than 36 hours, we can say with confidence that the patch has greatly improved the connection and lag issues.  We’ve gotten virtual heaps of emails and read hundreds of forum comments from players letting us know that they’re getting into games, lag is back to nominal levels, and host migration is working.  That’s been our experience, too.  Phew.  I’ve said it elsewhere, but it’s worth repeating:  thanks for your patience during this last week!

Celebratory vacation honeymoon over, and down to business.  We’re now moving on with other critical bug fixes and refinement to the game.  We’ll keep you posted as this effort becomes better defined over the next week.

Losing (Loser) Hosts Leaving Games

If you’re the host, please see out the game.  Certain hosts, if they are about to lose a game, are dropping the game in effort to maximize their rank.  This is weak, unsportsmanlike behavior, and disrespects everyone else.  We’ll be reworking the rank system anyway, and total points will probably matter more than average, so you’re only hurting yourselves in the long run.  For the rest of you, sorry about that.  It’s a risk in any peer to peer game, but made worse by the current rank system.  We also don’t have a means of discouraging it, such as a negative impact on reputation, or a chicken icon in front of names.  We’ll look into that.  Host migration takes care of this more (most?) of the time, post patch, but still…

Team Balance

Since I’m posting about good sportsmanship, here’s another trend in the wrong direction – players are switching teams to be on the winning team.  This results in more than a few games where teams are imbalanced.  One side will have 15 humans, and the other side 6.  Go figure – the humans win.  Not so fun.  We’ll be looking at this one in the near future, too.

That’s all the news that’s fit to print, this Sunday morning.  Enjoy the rest of the weekend!

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.

Future Patches & Updates

In future patches or updates, we will address other bugs and issues.  Again, we wanted to get this out as fast as possible, and so changed only what we could safely and by last Monday afternoon.  Down the road, we will address less common and less severe issues including: disappearing princesses, broken hat machines, migration issues, and the rank system.  We may also address other features and balance issues.

Thanks for sticking with us through this crazy first week.  There is more great stuff to come.  Have a fantastic weekend and see you online!

- Titan Dev

We’ve just received word from Sony America that the Fat Princess connection and lag patch for North America will go live tonight, Friday August 7th!!  Woo hoo!  Now let’s hope it works.

According to Sony Europe, the patch for European territories will be up next week.  Sony Europe has to test for more territories, so it is taking a little longer to get it done.  Before anyone flames us with 56,017 angry emails about Europe abuse, please note: Titan Studios has nothing to do with this decision or process! We submitted the patch for all territories to Sony last Monday.  If we could get it to you today – we would!

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Matt Morton, Deborah Mars and the fine folks in Sony QA who made this happen in record time.  We submitted the fixes to them on Monday afternoon.  Normally, the testing process takes about two weeks, but they pushed it through in a scant four days.  On behalf of Titan Studios, we thank you.

We will release detailed patch notes and a few other specifics when the patch actually goes up.

blog.titanstudios.com

Just a quick update to let  you know we have uploaded some template files for making your own Fat Princess Themes for the PS3. Click here for the Zip archive.

We’ve seen some great stuff put out by the community already–keep up the great work guys!