Five on Friday

Five on Friday was an effort to take important questions asked by the playerbase at various disparate venues and display them in one prominent place on the Ultima Online homepage so that a greater number of players could view the answers. It was originally written by Wilki (Mr. John Wilkinson), was later entrusted to Jeremy (Ms. E. Jeremy Dalberg) when Wilki become a Designer in November, 2006; was then taken over by Joanne (Joanne Laroche) when Jeremy left the company on October 31, 2008; and was delegated to Chrissay (Chrissay Zeeman) after becoming Community Coordinator on January 22, 2009.

It was decided that the number of questions each week would be five in order to maintain consistency, although this number has not always been strictly adhered to, and that they would be culled from various forum posts and other sources throughout the week and presented on Friday before most of the development team went home for the weekend. Some of the questions were originally answered on the forums and copied and/or modified to fit in the Five on Friday, and some were only answered in the Five on Friday.

After Chrissay left EA in early November, 2009, the Five on Friday was at least temporarily replaced by an "Ask the Devs" forum on Stratics.

Alliteration

Beginning on January 26, 2007, Jeremy began naming the Five on Fridays with oddly alliterated titles. Then on February 8, 2008, she made a forum post on Stratics asking for input on whether or not she could break from this theme as she was running out of words beginning with the letter F. After much discussion, it was decided that the alliteration would continue, but that the choice of letters would be expanded to include the entire alphabet. This plan was only followed for a short time, however, and the Five on Fridays went on to possess names of all configurations.

Disclaimer

After repeated complaints concerning the reliability of the information from old Five on Fridays, Jeremy retroactively added a disclaimer to every Five on Friday. It is as follows:

PLEASE NOTE: The Five on Friday archives are not updated with each patch. Please take older documents with a grain of salt, as they may be inaccurate.

Controversy

It was common for controversy over the Five on Friday questions to break out on the forums. Arguments frequently arose if less than five questions had been answered, if some of the questions were never actually asked by anyone, or if some or all of the questions were in fact not questions at all, but were actually in-character conversations in support of recent in-game events, general announcements, or other, non-question items.

List of Five on Fridays

These are all of the currently known Five on Fridays, listed in reverse chronological order.

Note: Some Five on Fridays were posted either on Saturday morning, or so late on Friday night as to be Saturday morning for most time zones. Some other Five on Fridays were posted on Thursday due to the development team needing to leave on Friday to reach a Town Hall or other event. Their associated dates reflect this. Also note that some weeks are missing due to them coinciding with various holidays or other events, meaning that no Five on Friday was posted for those weeks.