Announcements List

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.

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

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 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. Have fun, go play!

Hello everyone! We are still working around the clock to meet our goals for the Britannia launch. We are still on track and expect to bring the servers online within a target timeframe on 6/20 between 7pm-8pm Eastern Time. This is still subject to change, and may ultimately happen earlier or later, but we will do our best to stick to this timeframe. We'll post again as we get closer and if anything changes. Thanks again for your patience and your support!

The Polymorph spell has been temporarily disabled while we work on the ongoing issues with it. Thank you for your patience, we'll advise when it is available again.

We are back online. We will be monitoring closely, however please note that if the issue that caused us problems earlier returns, we may have to go offline again at short notice.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

-- The Team

We are experiencing ongoing issues at our host as a result of a maintenance/upgrade window. We were advised there would be no impact to customers during this time, however clearly that is not the case.

There is no ETA at this time and you may experience odd behaviour or inaccessibility with the game or any of the related services.

Thank you for your patience. We will update you with more information as it comes to light.

The rules page has been moved from the old wiki to the LOU website at https://legendsofultima.online/about/rules

​​​​​​​Some changes were made so please make sure you read the page and familiarize yourself with the rules, as they go into effect immediately.

Thanks for your understanding and for playing fair.

As you're all probably aware, the server is offline right now. We've identified a critical issue that must be resolved prior to us bringing it back online. At this time we cannot offer an ETA, however know that we're all working on it to get things going again ASAP.

Keep an eye out for further announcements here in #news. Sorry for the delay in the release of this notification.

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.

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 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'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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

All town vendors have been made invulnerable for the time being while we work on updating their AI to be in line with Britannia-era combat mechanics and as such, they will be unavailable for snooping or thievery while invulnerable. Thanks for your patience while we continue to work on things

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

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 issue with the official map has been resolved, and it is now available again.

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.

It's been a bumpy ride, no question about it. Thank you all for bearing with us during this time. Today, we broke another record for number of players online, as more and more folks jump on board with our little project.

With that being said, we absolutely have some growing pains to deal with, and you're seeing evidence of that right now with little annoyances like the occasional crash, disconnects when teleporting and the like. We do have a plan in place to address all of this, however we want to be transparent with you and let you know that this will likely take us well into the coming week before we potentially fix the underlying issues and we're able to achieve better stability.

Rest assured though, we firmly believe it's just a matter of time before we have this sorted and we are working overtime to get these challenges resolved. In as much as we can of course, as we all have families, lives and jobs - this is a hobby for us after all!.

Thanks for bearing with us, it's been an amazing ride so far. We look forward to more to come, and can't wait to get past these initial stability challenges, turn on some more systems (treasure hunting and housing are next off the list) and create more content for you all!

-- The Team

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.

It's not going to answer every question, but we hope we've covered the important ones! Something to read while waiting for the main event:

https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/transition-faq