Announcements List

We'll be offline for up to an hour during this evening's maintenance window @ 9am UTC. Thanks for your patience.

The Wiki Bot is temporarily offline, it'll return to service after it's had a pina colada or two on the beach.

We're back online. Go play!

During the next restart period (9am UTC 16th September) we will remain offline for up to 2 hours to perform extended maintenance.

Thank you for your patience.

We are aware of ongoing lag issues that some users are experiencing. At this stage, we are waiting for a core issue to be rectified at our host, at which time we will most likely move back to our original datacentre.

The latest advice is that they are working with their network equipment vendor to patch and resolve the issue. Unfortunately this seems to be taking an extended amount of time, however as soon as we are advised that this issue is resolved, we will in turn advise you all.

Apologies for this, it is out of our hands at this time. We know a few of you have suggested moving to an alternative host, however please understand that is not a realistic avenue for us at this time due to both the cost and time involved. We are not a simple 'single server' solution like a RunUO/ServUO shard.

We are looking for ideas for the new Discord logo. Are you handy with Photoshop? We'd love to see what you can come up with. If you are interested in helping out and want to submit an image to be considered for the rebranding, please do so on our forums: https://forums.shardsofbritannia.com/topic/30/discord-logo-submissions Thanks in advance

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.

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!

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!

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.

We are back online. Have fun, go play!

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 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

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 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.

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 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

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!

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

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.

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 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

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 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.

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!