Broadsword Online Games will be releasing both a new patch and a publish for Ultima Online today:

Good afternoon,

We are putting out a new client patch which should fix the Japaense cliloc errors tonight . All servers will receive a publish during their normal maintenance hours to change the way the 14th Anniversary Shard Shields function. They will now only allow transfers once every 2 weeks. You will see a disturbance in Character transfers until all shards get the same server version.

Thanks everyone!

UO Team

So there’s that. For all I know, some of you have already seen these changes put in place, depending on when your preferred server’s maintenance cycle takes place.

The First Age of Update: Bonnie Armstrong, UO’s producer, provided a few more details about the Shard Shields issue over at Stratics:

After this publish, we investigated further and discovered that only a small group of players exploited the dupe of the shield tokens. We are deleting those tokens and reverting the fix back by Monday at the latest.

It was not our intention to punish any innocent players, but to remove the 18,000 tokens that where duped. We have seized the houses and actioned the accounts of those responsible.

We appreciate your patience while we resolve this matter.

The offending parties, in other words, have been notified and shot.