There was something of a double post (albeit with slightly altered verbiage between the two posts) published to the Ultima Online website today:

As you may have heard we launched our newsletter this month! If you have not signed up please take a few moments and sign up for the newsletter at UO.com. In future newsletters we’ll be conducting contests, sharing questions and answers from the Meet & Greets, and giving a heads up on what’s new for Ultima Online. You can check out the newsletter here.

For those that haven’t signed up for the newsletter we wanted to make sure you know about our special Time of Legends promotion! If you have a current subscription, reactivate your account, or start a new account in August, September, or October, your account will have the Time of Legends expansion applied automatically. A gift from us to you! This offer is available if you use a recurring credit card subscription or if you use game time codes.

This next bit of text seems to be the main difference between the two updates:

Something I did want everyone to be aware of is that the expansion will automatically be applied but you will see a delay posting it to the account center update. I do not have the exactly amount of time as of yet but will let everyone know when I do.

Anyway, the important takeaway here is that most Ultima Online players have a relatively straightforward means of getting their hands on the Time of Legends expansion for free…or, at least, for no additional cost outside of the cost of game time codes or a monthly subscription.

Also, the deadline for the Japanese game codes has come and gone. Here’s a rough translation of the Japanese, per Google:

Dear the top patronage Ultima Online, Thank you very much.

The other day, as I was allowed to guide you, we were allowed to terminate the support of Ultima Online-related code that has been sold in Japan as we have a 59 pm July 31, 2015 23. The appropriate code we have already become the state may not be available.

It should be noted that, based on the law, Paragraph 1 Article 20 on the financial settlement, so that we can implement the following as refund of targeting customers with the relevant code of unused, will guide you.

● refund your offer period

August 1, 2015 0:00 – October 21, 2015 23:59

※ If there is no offer of refund within this period of time, it will be disqualified from this refund.

Please refer to the following URL For details of the object code and the refund procedure.

The URL in question is this one: http://help.ea.com/jp/article/uo-jp-support-codes/.