The Ultima Online House of Commons is a collaboration between the makers of UO (the Development Team and Game Masters) and Stratics to bring you the means to express your views about UO through an open forum. As the motto above states, our goal is to form a more common bond between the Peoples and Rulers of Britannia. How do we do this? Read on...

Open House Chats

Every first Thursday of the month at 7:00 PM Central Standard Time (8:00 PM Eastern and 5:00 PM Pacific), we hold an Open House chat between the players and the Dev Team. Thes chats occur on a monthly basis on irc.stratics.com #uohoc. You will need an IRC client in order to participate. If you have any questions on this matter, or are new to IRC, please refer to our online tutorial located at the Stratics IRC website.

In order to maximize the total number of possible attendees, we have networked together multiple servers. If you find that you are unable to connect to irc.stratics.com, please try one of our alternate mirror servers listed under the Server Data section of the HoC.

Every new Open House chat will have a particular Topic, which will be announced beforehand. In addition a webpage will be made available to our readers where questions can be placed in advance. Other readers will have the ability to vote on the questions posted, thereby indicating to the UO Development Team what issues are in need of addressing most.

In addition, remember that the UO Development Team from Origin may not have the opportunity to answer all of your questions. A particular question may not be answered if considered inappropriate by the designers, or if it has been better answered through some other question.

At the beginning of each chat the question takers will be announced as such: "In order to submit questions please /msg or /query Jerrith, Niobe, XenaDragon or Tigger." The topic of the IRC channel will be changed accordingly, so even if you join the chat after it has begun you can still see who to send questions to by looking at the topic.

A detailed explanation on which questions to submit (and which not) is available.

If you have a question that you want to see answered then you can send it to one of the question takers by entering for example "/msg Jerrith Why was opening your bank box from your boat removed from the 'In Testing' list ?" The question takers will go over all the questions sent to them and select the ones that are about the current topic first. One by one these questions are then presented to the development team and a decision is made whether the question can be answered or not. If the question can be answered then it is posted in the #uohoc channel by the chat moderator and then one of the dev. team members will answer it there. In the meanwhile the question takers present the next question to the dev. team.

If all goes well then the questions and answers should be appearing in the #uohoc channel at a steady pace. However, sometimes a question sent in requires some discussion, or even a bit of research, before it can be answered. During these times nothing seems to be happening in the main channel but you can rest assured that in the background the moderator, question takers and development team are working hard to eventually present a correct answer or reply.

While the main #uohoc channel is moderated (meaning: only a select list of people is able to 'speak' in that channel), the general #ultima-online channel is available to the public during the chat. If you want to comment on, or talk about, the answers given during the chat you can do so in there. Usually a lively discussion spawns during the House of Commons chats.