Recent News List

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.

Group Combat, Shared Loot

• group healthbars with heal/cure/bandage buttons
• group consent added to toggle allowing combat/looting between group mates & you will be asked if you want to consent when first joining a group
• group auto-loot sharing added, will distribute loot between nearby groupmates when using auto-loot on non-player-corpses
• group invite setting added to toggle allowing all group members inviting to the group without needing to be promoted

Criminal Action Confirmation

• now has 3 options: Allow Criminal Actions, Ask Me First, Prevent Criminal Actions
• change this setting in Character Settings under the Combat tab

Combat Target Restriction

• wiki page added: https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/combat#target-restrictions-new-feature
• allows players to restrict selecting mobs to a certain type like: All, Monsters, Players, and more
• added to character settings & can also click the top-right corner button next to minimap to quickly change this option, previously this button changed the Confirm Criminal Action toggle
• this option is meant to reduce misclicks when trying to select certain types of mobs in close encounters with lots of mobs
• example: if you set this to Monsters, then you will only be able to select Monsters when clicking mobs to target them for combat
• should not affect spell-targets or other item-based manual targeting, and will still be able to target mobs normally with those actions

General Combat-Related Changes

• using bandage self, bandage last or bandage button from group healthbar will no longer change current-target on use
• potion toxicity on self-healthbar will now only appear when toxicity is above 0
• when logging out in a house you have permission to or in a public inn, you will no longer be required to wait 2 minutes before timing out due to recent combat with non-player beings, previously attacking monsters or other beings would affect this
• added Enter Combat w/Spellcast option so that mages without melee skills don't have to toggle warmode after casting
• you can now see your guildmates/groupmates when they are dead, regardless of if they are in war mode or not

New Custom Client Actions

• Custom Client Action 3 is now Nearest Target option
• Custom Client Action 4 is now Cycle Target option
• both of these options work in conjunction with the new target restriction option
• these actions can be set to hotkeys under Settings -> Keyboard

Hotfix from today:

• resolved town vendors stealing people's money when trying to buy Used items from them
• town vendors should finally clear out their Used inventory regularly

Hotfixes/changes from last week:

• resolved not being able to give murder count to characters when dying from Poison spell in some cases
• poison will now fall off if the caster is a player and dies around the victim
• fixed issue with house sign not setting owner after transferring house sometimes showing previous owner or no owner at all

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.

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.

As you may be aware, earlier this week we identified several users involved in abusing some economic vulnerabilities that were discovered. At that time we had to roll back the server to recover from the impact and to protect our newly established economy.

After that incident occurred the players involved began to launch an attack on the LOU infrastructure (DDoS) causing our servers to become inaccessible. The players involved have since been banned and ejected from the community, but the attacks continue to occur occasionally.

At this time we are doing everything we can to prevent outages, but there may be times when the server will have to be brought down unexpectedly in order to recover.

We will be monitoring things closely to try and prevent downtime and loss of progress, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and support through our growing pains.

• Mana Vampire can be cast upon thyself again and will properly do a Resist and Gain check, where previously it would prevent it.

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

Map marker icons have had an optimization pass and have been re-enabled. Just a heads up that we may need to further optimize or change the way the map marker icons appear but will try this for now.

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.

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

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.

As many of you know we are working on development of a brand new factions system. We plan to release this new system in phases and we will be providing previews as development progresses. However, we do not want to hold up our players from fighting each other in factions PvP for this new system to be completed. So we have decided that today we are opening factions up for play! We will be providing new content to factions in phases. Today is simply going to be opening up PvP between factions. Keep an eye out for faction leaders looking for recruits!

Sounds from applying bandages as well as sounds from instruments will now only play to yourself while inside of town.

We'll be doing a quick restart in about 30 minutes for maintenance. No downtime is expected.

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

• Added an /exhausted command to show currently capped skills.
• Fixed an issue with Magic Trap spell endlessly triggering on containers despite removing the trap with the Remove Trap spell.
• Runebook will now remain open until a Charge is consumed via the Use Charge ability.
• Wisps have had their spell casting fixed and their Gold drops reduced to intended levels.
• Slightly increased Taunt range from 6 to 7 for Tanks.
• Adjusted Camping gains and the 75+ Camping regen bonus.

• Can no longer mount while using a bola + bola target times out after 15 seconds if no target is selected
• Fixed issue with hitting escape after using a bola causing users not to be able to mount for some time
• Current target healthbar numbers will now update periodically
• Dead characters will automatically be set in combat mode during load
• Town vendors will keep only a small amount of used items after players sell things to them
• Nearby pets that are not attacking anything will automatically follow when owner dies
• Pet stable fees will no longer be charged until pet has been stabled for 24 hours or more
• Fixed issue with not being able to use "all aggressive" or "all passive" commands with pets, aka Pet Stance
• Help Requests are now attached to user accounts and will remain open when you log out/switch characters & if staff responds while you're logged out, you will be notified during next login of the response
• Added Events news type to News Window & Notifications
• Fixed issue with being unable to open someone else's paperdoll from a reasonable distance

• Fixed issue with being unable to accept friend requests from the notification panel, optimized adding/removing friends in general
• Dragging resources/stackable items to the hotbar will now default to a "Command" button, bypassing the old "Resource" style button, preventing hotbar icons from saying "No Items Available" when there actually is items in your backpack
• Lumberjacking has been optimized to get a few more chops out of each tree
• Fixed issue with crafting favorites going to the wrong recipe or none at all
• Fixed issue with pets not casting
• Removed the macro interrupted speech when a target is not acquired
• Fixed issue with being able to over-stuff packhorses
• Tracking will now be interrupted by damage received and death
• Fixed issue with Guild security options being available when no guild is assigned to house
• Fixed issue with stacks of objects not responding to player split requests in some cases
• Fixed issue with stacks of gold being created over the stack limit size of 60k in some cases, like on monsters
• Potion kegs have been reworked, fixing the issue with potions being eaten & improving their general performance and behavior, like with auto-filling kegs when crafting potions & you may notice the right-click options look/behave slightly different than before
• Fixed issue with released pets names staying blue erroneously, they should go back to their wild name color (gray usually); they will also be aggressive once again

The server is back online.

Go play!

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

• Missing when attacking in combat is now fixed
• Not being able to split stacks is now fixed

Please log out and back in to the game to enable these fixes.

• Healing animation should be fixed, and a 3 Second Cooldown has been added to the Healing Hotkeys of Use Bandage, Bandage Self, and Bandage Last Target.
• Harpies and other various creatures in the world that were unexpectedly unaffected by Bard skills, should now work properly.
• Camping bugs were fixed and the time it takes to build the different stages of the campfire and tent/tent upgrades have been reduced slightly.
• A Teleporter has been added on top of Brit Bank roof to allow players to leave the roof if they lack the ability to teleport down from the roof.

The latest standalone client has been published to the LOA dashboard and can be downloaded at https://cdn.legendsofaria.com/Legends%20of%20Aria-1.4.1.0.zip

This can be used to install the game in cases where the LOA launcher fails repeatedly for some users.

*Torches should now occupy the torch slot and not unequip the right hand

*Killing/stealing from someone in town and looting with another multibox character should now be prevented.

Unidentified musical instruments will now properly identify

• Added looting rights as described at https://wiki.legendsofultima.online/en/notoriety
• A previous issue with Looting Rights not keeping track of Bard damage has been resolved