Recent News List

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!

Gameplay Notes

• All bosses have had their AI updated.
• All bosses have had their loot adjusted.
• Higher level bosses have had their loot greatly increased.
• Loot tables have undergone another balance pass.
• Spawning in Despise has been adjusted.
• Updated static collision.
• There is now a chance, scaled by monster difficulty, that young players will lose young status when killing very difficult monsters.

Notable Bug Fixes

• Staggering shot mount speed should return to normal after the effect has expired.
• Bandaging a ghost will no longer yield skill gains if the healer is below the requirements for resurrection.
• Attempting to cure poison will no longer yield skill gains if the healer is below the requirements for curing.
• Adjusted durability warning threshold.
• Move Speed should now always be recalculated on resurrection.
• Fixed a bug that caused aggression when taming a creature without a distance check first.
• Fixed an issue causing a criminal flagging when performing actions on yourself.
• You can no longer report yourself as a murderer.
• Fixed an issue causing bosses to continually reset.
• Fixed an issue causing titles to reassign when gaining skill.

We are doing a restart for some updates. We'll be back shortly.

The transition to Britannia is almost complete! Britannia has been live since June 20th, 2021 and the new world is thriving!

There are still some of you who have not made the transfer yet. Don't worry, you still have some time. Celador will remain online until August 1, 2021, we will share a more definite timeframe as we get closer.

In the meantime, please make sure you transfer any remaining characters to Britannia. After Celador shuts down, any remaining characters, houses, and items in the world will not be accessible.

Through the transition process, we have found an extreme amount of abandoned characters and accounts that people have not logged into for years. This presents an opportunity for us to clean up the bloat and increase performance by eliminating stale characters and items.

We've made the difficult decision to proceed with the Celador shutdown and purging old characters, to de-bloat the character database.

We understand that some people may not have had a chance to come back to LOU, so please make sure you tell your friends and family that had previously played but have not come back yet.

Thanks for your support and patience, we appreciate you!

It's finally time! Here is some more supporting information on what to expect:

https://wiki.shardsofbritannia.com/en/transition-faq

See you in game!

Patch notes for Test Center are being kept track of here: https://forums.legendsofultima.online/d/28-test-center-patch-notes

This evening's maintenance and restart window will extend up to one hour while additional tasks are performed to cater for back end infrastructure changes. Moving forward from today, nightly maintenance windows will be a fixed 15 minute period. That is to say, the server will go offline at 9am UTC as usual, and return to service at 9:15am UTC, unless otherwise noted here in the #news channel.

Due to some major backend changes with the Legends of Aria architecture, we need to temporarily retire the Covetous and Destard dungeons. This will allow us to proceed with the latest LoA upgrade, including moving to a new Unity platform, which in turn lets us push ahead with our plans for the Britannia map.

Rest assured they will return in the near future. If you have characters that are logged out inside Covetous or Destard, those characters will automatically be ejected if you try to log them in. Once the regions are removed entirely, you should be prompted for a town when you try to log them in.

Thanks as always for your patience while we work through these latest challenges. Keep an eye on #news for a notice around the upgrade, at which time you'll need to update your clients as well.

We are aware that many players are looking forward to "June 21st" based upon the most recent YouTube video stating that we hoped to have some big news by Spring 2020. This was not intended as an actual deadline, and was never meant to be received as such, as it was more of a hopeful projection. Meanwhile, as many of you are keenly aware, the "human malware" that has impacted the world, has impacted us too, and things have slowed for everyone. We will be avoiding making such projections in the future unless we are absolutely certain of timelines. Apologies for any unintentional confusion, but we appreciate your passion and excitement for the project! Stay safe.

Crafting and the economy are top priorities for us to address with our move to Britannia. Our aim is to recenter the economy around players and the goods they can produce. We want to move closer to our roots in UO and then build on top of that with our own additions. To do this we will be implementing several overhauls to crafting, items, and combat.

The first of these overhauls will be to Inscription. Below is a preview of what to expect from this. None of these items or perks are finalized and are subject to changes.


Return of UO style basic Runebook and Spellbook.

As we return to UO scaled loot tables in Britannia, we intend to revert the recipes for runebooks and spellbooks back to their respective UO requirements. Full spellbooks and runebooks are needed by a large portion of the population at very early stages of game play. This change will allow new players to be able to get these items at a much lower cost than they are now. With this overhaul basic runebooks and basic spellbooks will no longer be a scribes main source of income. Runebooks and full spellbooks also become consumables for their more powerful counterparts, so they will always be in high demand.

Runebook Crafting Charges

Introduces inscription skill based variable max charges for runebooks.


Mystic Spellbook

This spellbook performs the same role as the basic spellbook with a few small perks that veteran players will appreciate.

Requires a full spellbook and a new consumable(s) to craft.
This item is blessed and provides 1 to 2 small bonuses and perks from a pool of perks.

Potential Perks Include but not limited to:

Chance on spellcast to not consume reagents
Small +% bonus to spell success chance
Small +% bonus to mediation

Sacred Runebook

This runebook performs the same role as the basic runebook with a few small perks that veteran players will appreciate. Like the basic runebook, this runebook will have variable max charges. Unlike the basic runebook, the legendary runebook will require you recharge it by purchasing more charges with gold.

Requires a runebook and a new consumable(s) to craft.

Perks Include but not limited to:

Chance +% to success recall
Consume X charges to gate travel


Volatile Spellbook


This spellbook performs the same role as the basic spellbook does but is intended for more advanced players. This spellbook is not blessed and provides small bonus to base spell damage at the expense of increased spell fizzle chance. The cost to produce this spellbook will be less than that of its legendary spellbook peers but not trivial either.

Requires a full spellbook and a new consumable(s) to craft.

Effects Include but not limited to:

Small +% bonus to base spell damage.
Increased spell fizzle chance


New Inscription Books

In an effort to expand the scribe's potential customers, we're adding some new books for players to use. To start with we will be adding the tamer's veterinary manual and the bard's songbook.


Veterinary Manual

Perks Include but not limited to:

Small +% bonus to veterinary
Small +% bonus to animal lore

Songbook

Perks Include but not limited to: (1-2)

Small +% bonus to provocation
Small +% bonus to discordance
Small +% bonus to peacemaking
Small +% bonus to musicianship

Loot updates

Each of these high level inscription items will require new consumables for their recipes. Some or all of these will be available at vendors and for adventurers out in the world.


The Road Ahead

We're excited about these changes and our plans to transform the player economy. Expect to see more details and testing ahead. Again, this is just a preview of our inscription overhaul. Everything in this post is subject to change.

Keep your eyes on the news as we will be sharing more details on inscription and other changes. We will also be talking about our vision for armor, additional Britannia content, and an extensive combat overhaul.

Hi Folks,

TLDR? See the last few lines at the end of the article.

Firstly, thank you as always for your patronage and doing what you do to support us and our development efforts. We are a little unique in terms of our game and platform, in that we are in development (early access) while you all put in the time and effort to play. Because of that, we always do what we can to limit the impact to players with the changes we make to get us moving closer to our vision for the game.

This news article is to announce that we are disabling enchanting as we know it. We appreciate that this will strongly affect those that have invested large amounts of time and effort into it. We have thought long and hard about this particular change, and wanted to share some of the reasons on why it needs to be done.

- The two developers that wrote the system are no longer with us. The complexities of this system mean that it is quite difficult to simply pick up and support/balance ongoing. We've tried multiple times to make this happen, but the fact is it's just too much work. That's why for example you saw Five Star General disabled, but never brought back or otherwise addressed.

- Some of the enchants are wildly imbalancing, and result in trivializing encounters that we don't want trivialized. This means we need to redesign these encounters to suit the enchants, which simply isn't sustainable. (We should be designing enchants to match encounters, not the other way around.)

- Moving toward Britannia we are no longer using LoA monsters and PvE balancing will be scaled toward UO. Enchanting in its current form makes this very difficult to accomplish for us.

- Enchanting in its current state isn't lore friendly and doesn't meet the current team's ongoing vision for the game itself, especially with the impending move to the Britannia map later this year, and the rebasing of everything involved in that process.

- Enchanting in its current form has a fairly significant performance impact on the game. This was one of the primary reasons for disabling Five Star General, which was an extreme case of performance impact.

- Our other, more extreme, alternative to this was an item/gold wipe, which we really wanted to avoid. While the economy is definitely not in a great state due to multiple challenges over the last year or so (yes we are well aware!), we want to avoid any sort of wipe wherever possible.

- We are working very hard on creating new systems which will empower our crafters and player economy, enchanting conflicts with our long term vision for this in its current form.

However, your characters will continue to track what enchants they previously had from 'Enchanting v1.0', and as we move forward and potentially introduce an 'Enchanting v2.0', we will look to make sure that characters that previously put in the time, money and effort are rewarded appropriately. Plans aren't set in stone for this part yet, but we'll share more detail as soon as we can.


Hang on to your enchanting mats too - we will once again look at a way in which we can make these worth something to you.


TLDR?

- Enchanting v1.0 is disabled for the short term.
- Enchanting materials will no longer drop off mobs.
- Enchanting may return with a v2.0 in the long term. It will be a ground-up redesign/rewrite
- Keep your mats, we will look to reward you for that investment and will advise on how we will do that later down the track.
- Your character will continue to track what enchants you had from v1.0, and we will also look to reward you for that investment as well.
- We have exciting overhauls to the player economy and crafting coming very soon!

Attention Tamers!
ZooKeeper will remain active temporarily while we move through this transition.

Thank you once again for your continued participation in our project, and we sincerely hope you'll enjoy everything we have in store in 2020.

Since we are about to enter a new month, and with seeing the news of even more extreme weather and natural disasters happening around the globe every week, I wanted to remind everyone of our Vacation Hold policy.

If you are in any position where you cannot get to the game for an extended time, whether it be military deployment, natural disasters, or something else please reach out to us, and we can consider your request to put your house into a Vacation Hold to prevent it from decaying in the normal timeframe.

We're streamlining our announcements, patch notes, known issues, and town crier news into a new system that will allow everyone to see them in Discord, in-game, on our webpage, and on the Wiki. This is in an effort to make sure we're always providing up-to-date information in all outlets.

Changes coming with this:
- You can view the news webpage at http://news.legendsofultima.online (mobile-friendly, save to homescreen to make an app shortcut)
- The in-game MOTD window has been replaced with the LOU News Feed that will popup on login unless you chose it not to; you can also use /news to open it, or double click a Town Crier
- Town Criers now have their own stream of news and they will only announce recent news, ignoring news that is too old. If no news is available, they will wait until fresh news comes in.