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.

The server is back online and the shutdown of Celador has been completed. As previously mentioned, any characters, items, and houses that were left behind are no longer accessible.

If you have any characters remaining in 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 back if no one is available to help immediately.

Thanks for your continued patience and support through the transition.

Update your bookmarks! The news feed has been migrated from the old news.legendsofultima.online to https://legendsofultima.online/news and the in-game feed and Discord bot now reflect the new feed.

During the usual 9am UTC/5am US EST maintenance window, we will remain offline for up to 2 hours while we do additional maintenance work. We apologise for this, however it is the first in a series of steps to minimise downtime, crashing and restarts, and we feel it's important enough to do this on the weekend while we have multiple staff members available to support that activity.

If all goes well, we will complete the work in a much shorter timeframe than 2 hours. Keep an eye on #news for notification on how we are travelling.

Thank you, as always, for your patience.

The server is up again! Sorry again for the inconvenience but we really appreciate your patience. :)

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

PLEASE CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO READ THE FULL MESSAGE.

Firstly, thank you all for your patience during this trying time. During this last window of the game being online, we were working closely with our hosting provider to identify further options for mitigation of the DDoS attacks that we are experiencing, beyond what was already implemented. We are now working with them to enable what is necessary.

Please note that this may take some time, and at this time, we will not be bringing the server online again until these steps are in place.

Also please note that we are not going to discuss the mitigations we are putting in place in any way. That would be detrimental to our cause. Rest assured that we know what our next steps are and we'll continue to work through what needs to be done to eliminate this threat.

Thank you once again, and we hope to return to service as soon as we can. There is no ETA at this time, however we do expect this process to take at least 1-2 days. As always, keep an eye on #news for any further updates.

The interactive map has now moved to:

https://map.legendsofultima.online

Please update your bookmarks! We have also updated the wiki.

An update has been made to the rules regarding multiboxing and spycams. Please re-read the rules at https://legendsofultima.online/about/rules. As a reminder, you are responsible for keeping yourself informed of the rules at all times.

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

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 are aware of the issue with the official map and are working to resolve it. Thanks for your patience.

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.

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.

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.

The latest standalone client has been published to the LOA dashboard and can be downloaded at https://cdn.legendsofaria.com/Legends%20of%20Aria-1.4.1.0.zip

This can be used to install the game in cases where the LOA launcher fails repeatedly for some users.

Go play!

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

The rules have had some amendments to the following sections:

• Unattended Macroing, Resource Harvesting/Gathering
• Multiboxing, PvP & IP Restrictions

Please make sure you read the updated rules at: https://legendsofultima.online/about/rules