Hi all,

Please click through to the link below to read this announcement in full.

We wanted to take a few minutes to write a bit of a 'state of the game' update. Firstly, thank you all so much for jumping on board with us. Seeing Britain Bank full of people, the streets of Minoc busy and ore flowing out of Minoc mines (when it doesn't get interrupted by a red-named individual!) and folks spelunking in our dungeons has been an amazing experience. We couldn't have done all this without you, so thank you!

Now for what the development team is up to right now:

1. Our #1 priority is performance and stability - they really go hand in hand, and that is what we are prioritising right now. While you may not necessarily see it as a player, we are still tackling some back end performance challenges which simply must be addressed before we can move onto anything else.

2. Critical bug fixes - I'm sure those of you that have sat through the multiple restarts with us already would be aware that we are beating down critical bugs left, right and centre. We know this is disruptive to your play time, and we thank you for your patience. It won't last forever, and we are making good headway here.

One of the most challenging bugs to date has been the trade window bug. Note that we are still working on the root cause for that one, and will advise just as soon as we're able to fix it.

3. Anything else - this includes any low priority bugs (not game breaking), adding content, tweaking balance, filling out the world, and everything else on our (quite frankly huge) to do list. All of this is prioritised lower until we get #1 sorted, and to a lesser degree, #2.

With all of that in mind, we are going to be a little more disruptive over the next day or two with additional restarts, as we work on #1. In most cases, we have to do this to enable other methods of logging and debugging, in an attempt to get to root causes of various issues. You may also see 'lag spikes' on occasion as we get the info we need. You may also wonder why we even need to do this, as the game is performing great for you all! We'll ask you to bear with us on all of that, and trust that it is necessary.

You're also going to see bugfixes potentially introduce new, unintended bugs on occasion. Sorry about that! Know that we are working on all of this as quickly as we can.

In addition, you will still see oddities like mobs in the water or up on mountains. You might end up in black space (send in a /page!) or encounter other 'cosmetic' issues that are annoying. We do know about most of these and will work to fix them, however as mentioned earlier, if it's not 'game breaking', it's taking a lower priority for now.

I'm sure we'll get 3 or 4 weeks down the track and look back at this phase and laugh. What I can share with you though is we are well prepared to deal with the issues that you only encounter once you actually 'go live' and we will work through them all.

We could have also delayed the launch to address some of these items, but we wanted to stick to our guns this time. I am hoping most of you agree that the game is generally in a decently playable state, and are having fun out there!

Sorry for the (slightly) bumpy road in the meantime. We look forward to continuing this journey with all of you!

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!

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

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

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

Despise is temporarily closed. Cora and The Piper had an argument and made a real mess in there. It's currently undergoing a deep clean and will be available again shortly. I'd still wear a mask though.

Some of you have reported persistent issues with being unable to fully update the game client using the LOA Launcher. At this time, if the troubleshooting steps outlined here: https://forums.legendsofultima.online/d/46-legends-of-aria-launcher-troubleshooting do not help, then we would normally advise users to download the client using the "Problems with the launcher? Click here" link on the download page, but the latest build has not been published there yet. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working with CS to get it published as quickly as possible for those affected. Thank you for your patience

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.

Thanks for your patience during the downtime, we have received word that the issue is now resolved and we are now bringing our services back online including the game server. See you in-game and thanks again for your support

We have sustained another attack today, this time of a different type. It has been mitigated, however unfortunately we have had to endure a slight rollback to 11:30 UTC/7:30 US EST.

We do apologise for the inconvenience. We will continue to defend ourselves as necessary and work through these interruptions in our service.

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

Due to another troublesome bug and an even larger player count (which we're not complaining about!), we will temporarily go to a 12 hour restart schedule to avoid a possible stability issue. We'll advise when we've squashed this one and change back to daily restarts.

"The Britain Royal Guard is seeking mercenaries willing to investigate three different suspected Dens of Evil. Our trackers have given us approximate areas for these Dens and they appear to be bound together with an unknown magic. We have sent many brave mercenaries to each already, but no matter how many times they cleanse these ritual sites.. they return. This is unlike anything we have seen before..."

First Tracked Location: https://imgur.com/XjZOegH

Second Tracked Location: https://imgur.com/S5nmsg4

Third Tracked Location: https://imgur.com/Ipmfexc

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.

Server will be coming down for a short restart to address some issues around 17:15 UTC.

Please help us welcome our newest teammate, Sol. Sol is currently training to be a Counselor and will soon be on the front lines helping players out when possible. Welcome to the team Sol! For those of you curious about what Counselors do, please see: https://forums.legendsofultima.online/d/45-about-the-counselor-role

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.

Due to ongoing connectivity issues, the server will remain offline until further notice. There is no ETA at this time.

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.

We'll remain offline for now while we work to solve this latest batch of issues. No ETA at this time.