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.

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.

"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

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.

We are back online. Have fun, go play!

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

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'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!

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.

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 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.

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

The servers will be going offline for updates in 15 minutes. Please make sure you have the latest version of the client installed. We will post again when the update is complete and the server is coming back online. Thanks for your patience

Server will be back in about 15 minutes after updates. Thanks!

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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 maintenance is complete, nice and early. Why are you reading this?! Go play!

It's time! Housing will be launched at 10am US Eastern Time/2pm UTC on Saturday 24th July. Some notes for you all:

• To build a house, you'll need to visit an architect and purchase a house placement tool. These will be available at the mentioned time and not before
• Both gold and legacy tokens can be used to contribute towards the cost of a house
• Pricing for houses can be seen once you purchase a house placement tool
• We will work towards having previews of each house available on the wiki in the next few days
• Valid areas for house placement are generally flat, green grass. Use your minimap to check these more accurately
• Please note that housing will NOT be available in Britain and Minoc/Cove to begin with. This is to ensure we can maintain an acceptable level of performance in the short term. We will give advance warning prior to these regions opening up for housing
• Within the next 48 hours, we will also launch an additional region north of Minoc. This will add a significant amount of extra housing space
• In total, you will have three regions to choose from in which to initially place a house - Yew, Wind and "North Minoc". Below is a link to an artist's impression of these regions to assist you:

https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/images/housing-launch.png

Additional features:

• Guilds will be available, via purchase and placement of a guildstone at a house
• Housing vendors will also be available

Thanks for bearing with us while we worked against everything that's got in our way since launch. We would have liked to have housing kicked off sooner, however unfortunately it wasn't meant to be.

Happy house hunting!

• After the next scheduled restart, the game will remain offline until the housing launch time of 10AM US Eastern/2pm UTC
• Further information on housing is available on our wiki here: https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/housing
• Cost, plot size, lockdowns etc will be available to you once you purchase a housing tool
• The final list of available launch houses may not 100% reflect what is shown on the wiki. We'll advise further with the launch announcement
• The area north of the town of Minoc is now available to players. This will also be one of the regions where you'll be able to place a house, as per the wiki article

To all,

We sincerely apologise for the (very brief) housing launch today. The server will be coming back online in the next few minutes, however there is some additional impact.

Unfortunately we are unable to return to the world save from just prior to the housing launch. Instead, we have had to roll back a further 45 minutes. This was unavoidable and had to be done to ensure the integrity of our data and the game.

We don't expect the issue we experienced to return, and please go ahead and place your housing. Thank you, as always, for your patience.

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