EverQuest Producer Thom Terrazas took a moment to welcome everyone back to Norrath and to let us know about some upcoming advents such as the "Recruit-A-Friend" promotion, Hardcore Heritage events, and plenty more (from EQLive):

Hello fellow Norrathians!

Welcome Back! I can't tell you how excited we are to have EverQuest back up and we can't thank you enough for your patience during the downtime.

So, you may question what the dev team was doing during the past couple of weeks, especially with forums and other common avenues of communication down. To say the least, it was very strange not having the game up and running after all these years. We worked diligently to ensure when we came back online it would be smooth sailing and we could get back to what we do best – evolving this epic game. Here is a sampling of some other things we worked on during the past couple of weeks:

We added content to the Hardcore Heritage events that challenge you even further than before. These events are scheduled to begin at the end of May and run through July. .

You might remember that we conducted some server side improvements at the end of April to enhance our update-process and reduce downtimes to the game. While the servers were down, we did further optimizations to continue the improvements on our load balancing. .

We have enabled Free Character Transfers off the Trakanon Server. .

We completed work on a new Fan Faire event which will be a nice change to previous tournaments. Also, we finished designing the panels that you will see at the Fan Faire this year. Not to mention, who you'll see in attendance. .

Marketplace - View and/or Inspect will always be visible now when rotating through items in the Marketplace. It should make it easier for you to find things you like. Also, you should see additional sub-categorization of items in the very near future.

We discounted a lot of holiday items in anticipation of moving them into our "vault". We'll remove these items from the Marketplace very soon and bring them back when those holidays cycle back again.

Again, those are just a few of the items we have been working on lately. We have more to announce leading up to Fan Faire.

The game update scheduled for the beginning of May has been rescheduled for Wednesday, May 25th to give it more time on the test server before release. The majority of the work done in May has been to resolve issues and bugs.

In June, you should see a new Recruit-A-Friend promotion, so be sure to recruit some friends and you will get rewards and bonuses!

Finally, we turned on a few things to welcome you back when the servers came up. We hope that you will enjoy the Double XP, Faction and Rare Mob Spawns. Also, anyone that had housing rent cycle while the servers were down, you have been given 30 days Free Rent-You will not be charged for at least another 30 days. In addition, if you have never tried housing before, you also will not be charged rent for 30 days so give it a try and let us know what you think.

Again, it's good to see everyone back! Thanks for hanging in there with us!

Thom Terrazas
Producer, EverQuest