For those of you unfamiliar with its history, Stratics was founded in 1997 by Den Dragon, originally as a Geocities site called Den’s Den: the UO Statistics Site. Its primary focus was on research and statistics pertaining to Ultima Online, and on guides for the game, and after a short time it was moved off of Geocities and onto FrostByghte; it was the virtual “neighbour” of The Wing Commander CIC for a goodly while, and (as I understand it) Origin Systems either foot the bill for its hosting entirely, or at least helped with hosting costs.

And, for the longest time, it has been the go-to online discussion space for Ultima Online players, so much so that several of the game’s developers have used it — and continue to use it — as the de facto official meeting space between them and the game’s fans.

And as of a few days ago, the entire domain — not just the domain name, but the entirety of its content as well — is up for sale.

When I spoke with the Ultima Online team for a recent Spam Spam Spam Humbug episode, one of the questions I asked them was whether they had any plans to continue to expand the community features of the official Ultima Online website with e.g. its own dedicated forums, rather than continuing to allow Stratics and the game’s Facebook page to serve as its main discussion spaces.

The answer, as you can hear in the podcast, was rather firmly in the negative. But I wonder if that is still going to be the case in the wake of Stratics coming up for sale? Given its large database of Ultima Online-related content and discussions, and given that the game’s developers have historically participated in those discussions and use those forums for announcements and engagement, it would make a certain degree of sense for Broadsword Online Games to acquire Stratics entirely, and bring it in under the umbra of UO.com.

(Hat tip: Tazar)