Hail citizens. We have some important news to share with you!

As you may be aware, this project started out as an experiment. It was unimaginable that it would grow into what it is today. To see where we've come today, let's take a quick look back at the history of the game and our project for a moment.

Starting out the game Legends of Aria was known as Shards Online, as some of you remember. Later it was re-branded to Legends of Aria, and more recently the platform is known as the Shards Engine, which makes this project possible.

After the game was re-branded to Legends of Aria, our project was just getting our test-server online and it was decided to use the name Legends of Ultima for the time being while we experiment with things and find our place as a project. This name wasn't originally intended to be used permanently, and admittedly it stayed around for longer than expected.

Today, the project has grown to a point where it is prudent to find its own identity, and as such we are excited to announce, the project will now be known as Shards of Britannia

This represents a new path forward as we progress into the future as a project on the Shards Engine with our new home in Britannia. What's next? We will be steadily working to replace branding across all platforms over time but will do our best to make the transition as seamless as possible. We hope that you are as excited as we are about the future and appreciate your support through these changing times.

Tonight's maintenance window @ 9am UTC (approx 1h 10 mins from the time of this notice) will be extended by up to an hour while we work on the 'lag' issues that are currently being seen.

Thank you as always for your patience.

Group Combat, Shared Loot

• group healthbars with heal/cure/bandage buttons
• group consent added to toggle allowing combat/looting between group mates & you will be asked if you want to consent when first joining a group
• group auto-loot sharing added, will distribute loot between nearby groupmates when using auto-loot on non-player-corpses
• group invite setting added to toggle allowing all group members inviting to the group without needing to be promoted

Criminal Action Confirmation

• now has 3 options: Allow Criminal Actions, Ask Me First, Prevent Criminal Actions
• change this setting in Character Settings under the Combat tab

Combat Target Restriction

• wiki page added: https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/combat#target-restrictions-new-feature
• allows players to restrict selecting mobs to a certain type like: All, Monsters, Players, and more
• added to character settings & can also click the top-right corner button next to minimap to quickly change this option, previously this button changed the Confirm Criminal Action toggle
• this option is meant to reduce misclicks when trying to select certain types of mobs in close encounters with lots of mobs
• example: if you set this to Monsters, then you will only be able to select Monsters when clicking mobs to target them for combat
• should not affect spell-targets or other item-based manual targeting, and will still be able to target mobs normally with those actions

General Combat-Related Changes

• using bandage self, bandage last or bandage button from group healthbar will no longer change current-target on use
• potion toxicity on self-healthbar will now only appear when toxicity is above 0
• when logging out in a house you have permission to or in a public inn, you will no longer be required to wait 2 minutes before timing out due to recent combat with non-player beings, previously attacking monsters or other beings would affect this
• added Enter Combat w/Spellcast option so that mages without melee skills don't have to toggle warmode after casting
• you can now see your guildmates/groupmates when they are dead, regardless of if they are in war mode or not

New Custom Client Actions

• Custom Client Action 3 is now Nearest Target option
• Custom Client Action 4 is now Cycle Target option
• both of these options work in conjunction with the new target restriction option
• these actions can be set to hotkeys under Settings -> Keyboard

Hotfix from today:

• resolved town vendors stealing people's money when trying to buy Used items from them
• town vendors should finally clear out their Used inventory regularly

Hotfixes/changes from last week:

• resolved not being able to give murder count to characters when dying from Poison spell in some cases
• poison will now fall off if the caster is a player and dies around the victim
• fixed issue with house sign not setting owner after transferring house sometimes showing previous owner or no owner at all

• Added a black smoke fizzle animation for spells.
• Updated messaging for Starving skill/stat gains.
• Added Recall Sound/Animations to UseCharge on Runebook.
• Added animations to Tracking skill use for in tracking window and switching creature types.
• Fixed an issue with Campfire overlap by increasing distance between active campfires.
• Fixed an issue with Kindling no longer working after trying to place a campfire inside town.
• Updated messaging on Kindling use when Mounted, In Town, and near another Campfire.

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.

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.

• The minimum success chance of using a runebook charge has been returned to 50% (intended value.)

It's not going to answer every question, but we hope we've covered the important ones! Something to read while waiting for the main event:

https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/transition-faq

Server will be back in about 15 minutes after updates. Thanks!

"We have found a place of great evil in the region North of Minoc. Trackers have informed us that a Northern Cave is filled with a monstrous and deadly Arachnid. We fear that this beast is linked to the creatures on the Peninsula. If they launch an attack on Minoc, we will be unprepared to defend against them. We beg you, find their nest and extinguish them. We will forever be in your debt warriors.”

~Julie the Artisan of Minoc

Sounds from applying bandages as well as sounds from instruments will now only play to yourself while inside of town.

The server is temporarily offline due to an outage with the hosting provider. It was unexpected to have any downtime associated with this maintenance, but something has come up unexpectedly, so we appreciate your patience. We are monitoring the situation and will alert you as soon as the server is coming back online, or we know something further. <3

Non-faction players can no longer create collision with, heal, or give beneficial spells to faction players

After next restart, Karma should be functioning properly.

Secure Trading issues:

• we've received several reports of players having to click Accept repeatedly until the trade finally accepts

Corpse Looting issues:

• we're aware that many or all corpses are not appearing when attempting to open them and the best-known workaround is to use the Loot All context option

Pet Commanding issue:

• we're aware of an issue with pets not engaging in combat again as expected after being idle; best-known workaround is to say All Stop and then try your commands again

• Fixed an issue with being able to apply poison from a potion that has been moved outside of your inventory
• Prevented CAPTCHA from occurring too often while harvesting
• Removed mobs from spawning while harvesting due to CAPTCHA being enabled

• Fixed an issue preventing players from trading houses saying there are vendors working out of it when there is not
• Added option to house menu for the plot owner to be able to collect commissions from vendors that have been rented to other players
• Switching house privacy state from Public to Private is now possible even if the house has 1 vendor working out of it

-Short term murder counts should no longer reset upon death in the colosseum

-Looting any corpse but your own is disabled in the Colosseum

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