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Thanks to everyone participating in the Halloween events and activities, we hope you've enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed putting it together for you. We look forward to doing more in the near future.
Faction ranks are available on Discord for the new factions- simply run /rank rankname to add your faction role.
Available ranknames are:
The new Factions system is about to launch- in preparation, we have removed existing factions from all characters and removed the faction leaders as well. Hold tight while we get everything prepped!
The wiki has a new page for Halloween: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/halloween-2021 here you can see information about the Trick or Treating and the kinds of treats you can get! ^_^ Happy Hunting
There is a known issue with Steam users trying to log in to the LOA game, specifically error 105. Citadel Studios, the makers of LOA has been made aware and have stated they are looking into the issue. We hope the issue is resolved shortly so you can begin your Halloween hunting soon! Thanks for your patience.
The server is coming back online with the Halloween festivities activated as described in the previous article here: https://shardsofbritannia.com/news/halloween-event-progress-report
Halloween Paragon mobs will spawn in both dungeons and in overland & smashing pumpkins and graveyard camps will spawn only in the overland.
The Candy Vendor has not yet finished setting up their shop but we will let you know when they have, very soon. See you in-game and happy Halloween hunting!
The server is now offline for Halloween updates and will remain offline for approximately an hour! 🎃We'll post again when the server is coming back up, thanks for your patience.
The server will go offline around 11pm UTC/6pm Central (approx 2 hours from the time of this post) or a little later depending on our schedules. An hour prior to that we will schedule an automatic shutdown and begin announcing. The downtime is expected to last about an hour to deploy the Halloween updates. Thanks for your patience! 🎃
The Halloween event will start soon! Gravedigging needs a little more time and will come as quickly as possible after the event goes live.
When: The goal is for Today or Tomorrow 10/21 or 10/22 and will last 3-4 weeks, to end before US Thanksgiving
What to expect:
Soon to follow:
Test Center has been opened to the public for testing of Factions and Summoner content. To connect to test center, open your client and in the address bar at the bottom, connect to test.uo4.life:5002
For Factions: NOTE: All timers (capture, etc) have been set to 5 minutes temporarily to ease testing, except the sigil reset timer which is now set to 10 minutes to allow you to run between towns. Only Minoc and Brit are available, which is where you will find faction and town stones. This system is a direct copy of the old UO system, including stealing and IP restriction mechanics. https://uo.com/wiki/ultima-online-wiki/technical/previous-publishes/2000-2/2000-publish-08-5th-december/ We would love some robust testing of the general mechanics of combat and town capture in particular. As the fundamental mechanics of the system are a direct UO copy, these are unlikely to change too much. Wiki article: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/factions
Summoning: This system, however, is NOT from old UO, it is our own special homebrew. Think of it sort of like a "Magical Tamer." We'd really love some feedback on how the balance of these mechanics feel in PVE and PVP, and any ideas you have for improvements that would make it better (keeping in mind that the Summoner's Tome full of a bunch of new summons is on the not too distant horizon) Wiki Article: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/skills/spirit_speak
Vendors with full spellbooks and regs will be out at the banks shortly. Thanks for helping test!
Please report any bugs with /bug, feel free to ask questions.
A cold wind blows from the East and as it breezes past your cheeks you hear the faint cries of an otherworldly being. Its tongue is both unintelligible but strangely familiar, beckoning you, filling your mind with patterns you struggle to fully understand. What felt like an eternity of thought passes as quickly as it arrived and you return to your senses, wondering whether you've gone mad or tapped into an energy pulsing beneath the surface of Britannia.
(These changes are in testing and are NOT live- see more below)
Spirit Speak has been completely overhauled to allow for benefits for players wishing to focus on summoning! Currently these changes apply to existing summons associated with Magery, but in the future a Summoner's Tome will allow players with the Spirit Speak ability to summon even more creatures from another plane! Details can be found here: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/skills/spirit_speak
We need testers! Test Center will be publicly opened soon for testing of this new feature.
Sorry for the short interruption! Service has been restored. The server will come back online at it's normally schedule time in about 10 minutes after the posting of this
Factions have been completely overhauled from the ground up and include new content- including capturing towns and rewards! This content is currently in testing, but you can see what's coming soon (pending tweaks) at this article: https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/factions
Dev Blog/State of the Game:
Staff Activity
Some staff is on break right now for one reason or another, but not everyone is playing other games. Life always comes first and if things come up in life, it is always advised for staff to focus on real life, which may warrant some time away from the project. When staff members take breaks, that doesn't mean the separation is necessarily permanent or that they did anything wrong.
Player Feedback & Game Balancing
We do our best to read all feedback submitted, but we do not have the time to acknowledge or reply to most submissions. If you submitted something a while ago and it hasn't been improved yet and you have something else to add to your submission, please feel free to re-submit it, but please avoid sending in repeat submissions just for the sake of trying to get it fixed quickly. There's always a possibility that we have trouble replicating a reported issue, so more details or a fresh account of the issue is always welcome.
Additionally, it should be noted that not everything is final, and many features of the game are subject to change when we do balance passes and content expansions, but those things also take time to complete as we discuss, debate and use metrics to determine the best course of action.
LoA New Client/Citadel Studios Changes
A lot of people have expressed concern over the changes announced by Citadel Studios in regards to the new experimental client and 3D camera. We can confirm that this will not affect our project and there are no plans to shut down Legends of Aria as it exists today, meaning our project is not in jeopardy of being shut down due to the new client changes, nor will we be forced to use the new client. Additionally, a lot of people ask what happens if CS goes under? In the past, we have stated that it is possible that we may be able to continue the project if that ever happens, but neither we nor CS expects anything like that to occur, and we would do everything in our power to make sure we can proceed.
The Map
Most of the map terrain is complete but requires finishing touches. Right now progress is on hold while we work on other content.
Population
The population is always in flux and changing depending on many factors like new games coming out, limited time off for people, and season changes. The game is still being played by plenty of people and we are doing everything within our ability to release updates and content as we're able to, to keep people busy having fun.
Actions Against Player Accounts
Sometimes players break the rules or behave in a manner that is harmful to the game or our community and we have to take actions against their Discord privileges or in-game accounts. Players that have action taken against them are almost always verbal about it and claim they did nothing wrong when in fact they did. Please make sure you're aware of the rules and are abiding by them. We will never discuss actions taken against individuals specifically in public, but if you have had action taken against you, or you suspect so and would like to inquire about it, please use the Contact Us page on our website to do so. We understand that everyone is human and makes mistakes sometimes, and are willing to give second chances when people show remorse and willingness to do better, so you may dispute the actions and explain to us why you think they should be reversed, and we will consider. Reminder: Real Money Transactions are strictly prohibited and harmful to our economy, anyone suspected or caught buying and selling may be subject to have action taken against them pending review.
Goals & What's Being Worked On
We're always working on bug fixes and polishing existing features. Here are some of the goals on our list:
short term goals:
medium/longer-term goals:
The upcoming Fishing SOS changes are delayed slightly while we continue work on it, however, the container organization changes will go out tonight during the daily restart.
Apologies folks, we'll need a little longer to finish our tasks. This could be up to an hour, but should be sooner. Thanks as always for your patience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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All company, product and service names used in this website, or other outlets, are for identification purposes only. Use of these names, logos, and brands does not imply endorsement.
