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

• Ethereal statue should no longer get stuck in your pocket if you cannot mount for one reason or another; if it does somehow get stuck, logging out completely and logging back in will move it to your backpack
• Fishing skill can no longer be gained above 70 while inside of town
• Fishing will no longer yield anything more than basic fish or loot while inside of town
• Plant harvesting amount has been adjusted and we will continue to improve spawns if needed
• An issue with clicking on a news notification from the list not opening the appropriate article
• Fixed system message showing when using runebooks referencing "a recall rune"
• Summoned creatures should now properly decay if they have lost their owners
• Fixed an issue with stealing from a stack causing multiple items to pile up in your inventory

An issue with Fishing erroneously saying "go outside of town for gains" when you are already outside of town has been resolved. This hotfix will be available after the next scheduled server restart.

Critizens of Britannia, be warned! An increased Orc presence has been observed in our lands. These savage creatures know no limit to their ferocity and evil. But fear ye not! Your Brave and Courageous leaders are maintaining the guard around the clock, keeping the Orc scourge out of our city walls and your children safe from their barbarism.

[The Orc Guild has now been fully enabled. Players wishing to join the Orc Guild must seek out and contact a member of the guild]

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

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

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

• Fixed an issue that sometimes affected the ability to log in with a red character in Britannia
• Added a barber to assist with remodelling your hair, face, everything! The first visit is free. The barber/stylist will be in Sweet Dreams Inn in Britain
• After the next restart, the Limbo region will return. For those of you not familiar, if you are a ghost for longer than 15 minutes, you will be sent to this region. There are shrines available to resurrect you here, and then you can return to Britannia via the moongate.

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.

• Fixed issue with being unable to accept friend requests from the notification panel, optimized adding/removing friends in general
• Dragging resources/stackable items to the hotbar will now default to a "Command" button, bypassing the old "Resource" style button, preventing hotbar icons from saying "No Items Available" when there actually is items in your backpack
• Lumberjacking has been optimized to get a few more chops out of each tree
• Fixed issue with crafting favorites going to the wrong recipe or none at all
• Fixed issue with pets not casting
• Removed the macro interrupted speech when a target is not acquired
• Fixed issue with being able to over-stuff packhorses
• Tracking will now be interrupted by damage received and death
• Fixed issue with Guild security options being available when no guild is assigned to house
• Fixed issue with stacks of objects not responding to player split requests in some cases
• Fixed issue with stacks of gold being created over the stack limit size of 60k in some cases, like on monsters
• Potion kegs have been reworked, fixing the issue with potions being eaten & improving their general performance and behavior, like with auto-filling kegs when crafting potions & you may notice the right-click options look/behave slightly different than before
• Fixed issue with released pets names staying blue erroneously, they should go back to their wild name color (gray usually); they will also be aggressive once again

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

*Open Helms and Pitchforks can now be salvaged with the mining pickaxe tool near a forge

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.

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

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

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 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.