Water definitions have been added to every town! In those areas:

• fishing should be possible around all of the towns now
• creatures will no longer spawn in water
• players will no longer be able to go swimming

• Corpse mutilate option optimized, double-clicking blood spatter will open corpse as expected, and can also right-click and choose Loot All
• Issue with commanding pets to attack groupmates or your own pets resulting in "they cannot be attacked" erroneously has been resolved
• Blessed objects will now be moved to the backpack if they are inside another container in your backpack when you die

Earlier today, we identified an economy breaking issue. While we won't go into full detail on this, what we can say in summary is that a small group of players leveraged an exploit. Our telemetry identified this and we acted as soon as we noticed it.

The end result is that group of players have immediately had their accounts banned. We do not tolerate this behavior and there is no recourse for it. The side effect of is the detrimental effect on the economy. Based on a lot of deliberations and investigations over the last 7 hours, we have concluded that the only way to 100% protect the economy and our game is to execute a rollback.

The time that we are rolling back to will be 16:00 UTC/12:00 US EST on June 23rd. This is roughly 30 hours of play time. We completely appreciate that this is a less than ideal circumstance, and as such would like to reward our players that obey the rules and play faithfully with an additional gift that you'll receive on your next login, as well as a reset of all power hour and level cap timers. In addition, power hours for the next 24 hours will offer double the gain chance that they usually do.

Rest assured we have also made (and thoroughly tested) additional changes that will go a long way to ensure that this does not happen again. We have also made improvements in terms of notification for this particular issue, so that on the off chance it DOES somehow happen again, the lag time between the action and the discovery of said action will improve significantly.

We, like you, are incredibly frustrated with this situation and have had to take time away from our jobs and families to try and put things back in order. We hope you understand our approach to this, and look forward to hanging out with you in Britannia again shortly.

We'll be coming back online within the next few minutes.

We're investigating an issue with guards and will be down for a little bit longer.

As we grow in player count, we are tracking a performance issue that appears to be related to minimap icons (yes of all things.) We are disabling those and restarting to validate this.

We apologise for these teething issues, however we believe this will make a significant difference. We'll work on refactoring the minimap icon system and they will eventually return. In the meantime, use third party tools like http://lou-map.herokuapp.com/ to locate what you need. In particular, we'll have wandering healer locations up there shortly.

Over the last week or two, we've had a few of our players report rubber banding issues when connected to the game. Based on our investigations to date, this seems to be some sort of transient issue that is likely a poorly performing peer/segment somewhere on the internet.

Unfortunately it has yet to affect any staff, so it is difficult to troubleshoot further. However, here are some suggestions we have for those that are affected:

• Try using a VPN. Other users have reported good results using the free Avast VPN trial. We do not endorse any particular product in this regard.
• Try tethering to your phone ("hotspotting")
• Ensure you are not using any third party tools that interact with the client

A VPN or mobile hotspot will generally result in your connection using a different 'route' to the server. Think of it as taking an empty back road instead of a busy highway to get to your destination.

Unfortunately there isn't much else we can suggest at this time, and it seems the issue is largely out of our control. We'll continue to monitor it however, and offer any further insight as it comes.

Sorry, everyone, we noticed that some of the fixes we applied during the nightly restart had a flaw and we had to shut down unexpectedly. The server was only up for a short time after, but we still had to roll back to the time of the nightly restart. We apologize for the inconvenience and will be back online as quickly as possible.

It's time! Housing will be launched at 10am US Eastern Time/2pm UTC on Saturday 24th July. Some notes for you all:

• To build a house, you'll need to visit an architect and purchase a house placement tool. These will be available at the mentioned time and not before
• Both gold and legacy tokens can be used to contribute towards the cost of a house
• Pricing for houses can be seen once you purchase a house placement tool
• We will work towards having previews of each house available on the wiki in the next few days
• Valid areas for house placement are generally flat, green grass. Use your minimap to check these more accurately
• Please note that housing will NOT be available in Britain and Minoc/Cove to begin with. This is to ensure we can maintain an acceptable level of performance in the short term. We will give advance warning prior to these regions opening up for housing
• Within the next 48 hours, we will also launch an additional region north of Minoc. This will add a significant amount of extra housing space
• In total, you will have three regions to choose from in which to initially place a house - Yew, Wind and "North Minoc". Below is a link to an artist's impression of these regions to assist you:

https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/images/housing-launch.png

Additional features:

• Guilds will be available, via purchase and placement of a guildstone at a house
• Housing vendors will also be available

Thanks for bearing with us while we worked against everything that's got in our way since launch. We would have liked to have housing kicked off sooner, however unfortunately it wasn't meant to be.

Happy house hunting!

This evening we will be coming down for daily maintenance 15 minutes ahead of schedule. We will return to service at 5am US EST/9am UTC.

After this maintenance period, the server will restart once every 6 hours. We apologise for this, however it is a necessary step in order to ensure performance based on a very large increase in player count (thank you!) and a bug that we hope to resolve in the coming week. However, the restarts will now take 5 minutes instead of the 15+ that was the case previously.

You can check how long is left until the next restart by typing /nextrestart or /nextreboot in game. In this way, you can still plan your power hours etc. We will return to daily restarts as soon as we can.

Thank you, as always, for your patience.

• Added New Character Settings for Toggling Auto-Open of Killing Blow/Mutilate/Harvest under Combat Options.

As you may be aware, earlier this week we identified several users involved in abusing some economic vulnerabilities that were discovered. At that time we had to roll back the server to recover from the impact and to protect our newly established economy.

After that incident occurred the players involved began to launch an attack on the LOU infrastructure (DDoS) causing our servers to become inaccessible. The players involved have since been banned and ejected from the community, but the attacks continue to occur occasionally.

At this time we are doing everything we can to prevent outages, but there may be times when the server will have to be brought down unexpectedly in order to recover.

We will be monitoring things closely to try and prevent downtime and loss of progress, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and support through our growing pains.

"Warriors! The Ritual Site locations and the Weaver Cave that were cleansed in recent days, have regained their former strength... We ask for your bravery once again. My great warriors, please hear me! Vanquish these vile creatures! Do not allow them to encroach on our lands!"

Ritual Site 1: https://imgur.com/XjZOegH

Ritual Site 2: https://imgur.com/S5nmsg4

Ritual Site 3: https://imgur.com/Ipmfexc

Weaver Cave: https://imgur.com/fcAbiWR

~Sir Jeffrey the Justiciar of Britain

It's been a bumpy ride, no question about it. Thank you all for bearing with us during this time. Today, we broke another record for number of players online, as more and more folks jump on board with our little project.

With that being said, we absolutely have some growing pains to deal with, and you're seeing evidence of that right now with little annoyances like the occasional crash, disconnects when teleporting and the like. We do have a plan in place to address all of this, however we want to be transparent with you and let you know that this will likely take us well into the coming week before we potentially fix the underlying issues and we're able to achieve better stability.

Rest assured though, we firmly believe it's just a matter of time before we have this sorted and we are working overtime to get these challenges resolved. In as much as we can of course, as we all have families, lives and jobs - this is a hobby for us after all!.

Thanks for bearing with us, it's been an amazing ride so far. We look forward to more to come, and can't wait to get past these initial stability challenges, turn on some more systems (treasure hunting and housing are next off the list) and create more content for you all!

-- The Team

• There's a known issue with some objects not being able to be unpacked in houses such as, but not limited to: cauldron
• There's a known issue with some objects being able to be placed outside of the house foundation/walls, or in the yard

Warning: It is not intended to be able to place objects outside of the foundation/walls of your house. If you have objects placed out of bounds they may be subject to adjustments to make them in-bounds, or in some cases removed if they are blocking pathways. The small front yards are intended only for vendors or a guildstone.

Reminder: the Small Workshop and Large Patio houses are temporarily disabled for fixing, and we will try to make them available ASAP

We'll remain offline for up to an hour during the next restart window (type /nextrestart to see when that is.) to run some additional maintenance tasks. Thank you for your patience, as always.

We believe we have finally squashed the outlying performance bug that was forcing us to restart every 6 hours. As such, we will be returning to our usual restart at 5am US EST/9am UTC.

As a result, this next restart will take slightly longer than usual. We apologise for this, however rest assured that after this, we expect smooth sailing.

Thanks for your patience during this bumpy few weeks!

After next restart, cut off heads should display the full resurrection value of the dead.

Some performance updates are being applied. Should be back in just a few minutes.

• Can no longer mount while using a bola + bola target times out after 15 seconds if no target is selected
• Fixed issue with hitting escape after using a bola causing users not to be able to mount for some time
• Current target healthbar numbers will now update periodically
• Dead characters will automatically be set in combat mode during load
• Town vendors will keep only a small amount of used items after players sell things to them
• Nearby pets that are not attacking anything will automatically follow when owner dies
• Pet stable fees will no longer be charged until pet has been stabled for 24 hours or more
• Fixed issue with not being able to use "all aggressive" or "all passive" commands with pets, aka Pet Stance
• Help Requests are now attached to user accounts and will remain open when you log out/switch characters & if staff responds while you're logged out, you will be notified during next login of the response
• Added Events news type to News Window & Notifications
• Fixed issue with being unable to open someone else's paperdoll from a reasonable distance

An issue with accepting trade has been resolved.