Announcements List

This is a reminder to all that placement of objects outside the boundaries of your house foundation is not intended. Objects placed in this fashion are subject to removal, with a priority given to those that block access to land masses in any way.

Thank you for your understanding.

We're back online. Thanks again for your patience.

Apologies for the delay, we are running a little overtime with the maintenance work. We will aim to be back online by 11am UTC (ideally before that!).

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.

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

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.

We'll remain offline for up to an hour during the next restart window (type /nextrestart to see when that is.) to run some additional maintenance tasks. Thank you for your patience, as always.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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 servers are offline for the time being while we prepare for the transition process. As you know our team is global and therefore we are scheduling plenty of time in advance to allow for all teammates to complete any duties. Thanks for your patience through the downtime and please check back here periodically for further updates. See you on the other side!

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

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.

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.

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

In addition to our website and forums being updated in preparation for our big day on June 20th, our wiki has also been migrated and revitalised. Head on over to:

https://wiki.legendsofultima.online

to check it out. Don't forget you can search it directly from Discord - just type "!wiki searchterm". If you're interested in contributing to the wiki, please sign up using your Discord account, then hit up the #wiki-contributors channel in Discord and message the bot with "!wikicontributor"

Huge thanks to community member Beekel, who helped with forklifting a lot of the content over, in addition to creating new content AND writing the new bot for us. Much appreciated!

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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

The Auto Stack or Stack All option(s) was removed before the Britannia launch, but some people still had it enabled after the transition, even though the option was removed.

This feature has caused several client\graphical glitches in the past for people as items are moved around or consumed very quickly. The feature has been disabled in favor of preventing multiple stacks from accumulating in the first place.

Please let us know if you run into a scenario where multiple stacks of similar items are being added to your backpack when you wouldn't expect them to, and we will work to optimize any remaining cases.

As many of you know we are working on development of a brand new factions system. We plan to release this new system in phases and we will be providing previews as development progresses. However, we do not want to hold up our players from fighting each other in factions PvP for this new system to be completed. So we have decided that today we are opening factions up for play! We will be providing new content to factions in phases. Today is simply going to be opening up PvP between factions. Keep an eye out for faction leaders looking for recruits!

Test Center is now ready for transition testing! A few items to note:

What you'll see on Test Center is not 100% reflective of what you will see on launch day. There will be no lore etc, this is functional testing ONLY. We don't want to spoil everything!

• Your existing characters from Live have been copied to Test Center, and the existing regions are also present (i.e. your houses etc will be there)

• You may be presented with a region selection screen with a list of Celador regions instead of logging directly in like normal. This is fine, please choose a region to spawn in.

• The world is vacant of spawns EXCEPT bankers - bankers will sell pouches, which you can change into transition bags by putting them in your bank and right clicking them

• Near each bank will be a pedestal with a 'Tome of the Witch' sitting on it. When you're ready to commence transition, double click that and follow the bouncing ball

• Once you are in the transition area, you can interact with the large glowing gate to take the final step to Britannia

• Once you're in Britannia, you can type 'i must consider my legacy' to see your token count

• The Britannia token vendor is not available for testing at this time

Please do report any bugs you encounter - we also have full telemetry live on the transfer, so we should be catching anything and everything, but your assistance with reports would be appreciated regardless. We want to launch on time, so it is critical we get this part right!

Please note that, going forward from today, Test Center will no longer be available for general testing. Our focus now will be preparation for 'D-day', and as such, TC may be regularly offline, in different testing states, or inaccessible for most players. Additionally, Test Center vendors and editing characters will not be available, in order to properly simulate a live environment.

Finally, please bear with us in this final march towards our soft launch. There's still a lot of work to be done to make this a reality. Thanks in advance for your help, and we look forward to making Britannia a reality!

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.