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.

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 are beginning to restore services and will be back online shortly. Thank you for bearing with us. We have extra elements in play now to mitigate any further attacks.

We expect a small rollback as we come back online. These are inevitable in these types of scenarios due to the state of world saves and must be done to ensure integrity of our data.

As always, we appreciate your patience.

We will remain offline during our next maintenance window (9am UTC Friday 3rd September) while we complete migration to one of our host's alternative data centers. During this time, all of our services will be unavailable.

This is due to our current datacentre experiencing some ongoing issues which are intermittently affecting our services. Rather than wait for them to be resolved by our host, we will instead work around the issues by moving to a different physical location/datacentre within their network.

Rather than provide an estimate, we'll update you on the progress of the change via Discord during the migration window. Thanks, as always, for your patience.

We are back online in the alternative datacenter. Please note that we had to rollback to approx. 25 minutes before our normal shutdown time to preserve data integrity. This was due to the small blerp which happened around that time earlier today.

Apologies for that inconvenience, and thank you as always for your patience.

We are back online. Please note, direct connections will no longer work. Connect by selecting our server on the community server screen. Thanks for your patience, as always.

We are extremely pleased to welcome a new member to our team. Congratulations beekel!

beekel will be joining us as a Counselor, and behind the scenes, has already contributed greatly to our project in terms of the wiki, the related wiki bot and of course the interactive map.

He is also contributing in the form of custom music, which we hope to have in game very soon!

Please make him feel welcome.

Just a reminder from the article posted last week: https://legendsofultima.online/news/server-is-up-again-1

Any characters, items, and houses that were left behind in Celador are no longer accessible.

If you have any characters stuck in Limbo/Inbetween from the transition and have trouble progressing through the black portal, please send a help request and make sure your contact info (use /contactinfo command) is up to date so we can contact you if no one is available to help immediately.

The server will be coming offline for some extended maintenance @ 9am UTC on 28 July. https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/timezone/utc

The server will remain offline for up to an hour during this time.

As stated in our previous announcement https://legendsofultima.online/news/the-conclusion-of-celador Celador will be shutting down within the next 24 hours, and access to any remaining characters, items, and houses left in Celador will be lost.

We are aware some people have had issues going through the transition portal in Inbetween, so if you have any characters already in the Inbetween region, you will not lose access to them. We will work with those remaining on a case-by-case basis to get all stuck characters' transitions completed.

There is no specific time for the shutdown to occur yet, as it is subject to staff availability, but we will post again once we know more. Thanks!

We'll be back online shortly. We've had to rollback to a save state of 10:40pm UTC/6:40pm US EST to avoid potential data integrity concerns that were due to the connectivity issues being experienced. We apologise for this, however we don't want anyone losing items etc., and this is the only way to be sure.

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.

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!

The production server is back online with the latest version. Please make sure to have the latest client installed. At this time it is advised to use the "Download Now" button on the LOA Dashboard https://legendsofaria.com/dashboard to download and install the game with, as the standalone download has not been updated yet. See you in game!

Note: A common issue with the patcher seems to be that it fails twice but after the 3rd try it completes the updates. If you see "Patch Failed" just try re-loading the launcher and it should fail one more time, and then by the 3rd run be ready to play.

Tip: Untick "Verify Integrity" in the patcher after you've successfully launched the game and confirmed you can play. This will skip the lengthy scan that occurs every time you open the launcher. Turn it back on if you have crashes or errors playing the game.

Today on Memorial Day, we honor and remember all those who made the ultimate sacrifice for us. We are eternally grateful and forever indebted!

The servers will be going offline for updates in 15 minutes. Please make sure you have the latest version of the client installed. We will post again when the update is complete and the server is coming back online. Thanks for your patience

We're going to need to do an additional restart in about 20 minutes so that we can try to help some players who are unable to login. No downtime expected. Thank you for your patience as we try to get everyone in game again!

Server will be restarting in about 5 minutes. ETA about 15 minutes. Thank you!

This morning was different. The air did not smell as sweet as it did. A sense of dread had encircled the citizens of Celador. Shopkeepers left their stalls, aimlessly staring into the skies. Children stopped playing on the streets and ran home to their kin. Dark storm clouds began a slow march over the horizon, as sudden wind gusts began whipping the hair of frightened folks in the streets of Britain.  The air bristled with a static electricity and a foul stench. The well waters turned black with pestilence.  Crops began dying as if poisoned by some unidentified force, and the birds and animals all fled in every direction until no wildlife could be seen.

Then it happened... something arose from the ground in the center of the City of Britain. It was too dark to perceive who or what it was, but the energy emanating from it was unmistakable.  A great evil. Someone or something has arrived…

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In preparation for the main event, all servers will be offline from 7pm US EST/11pm UTC Friday 18th June. Please keep an eye on #news for further announcements over the course of the weekend.