The EQ team apologizes for the server instability in the past week. This instability occurs at peak times, and is seen to our users as "1017" errors. Normally within a few minutes these users are able to log back in, but on some servers this problem has occurred more than once in a single evening.
We're working to address the problem, and expect that in the next couple of days we'll have everything resolved. In the meantime, there's a chance you'll run into this problem if you're on a crowded server during peak times - if you do, you can normally get back onto the servers within 15 or 20 minutes.
For those of you who want to know more, read on.
Gates of Discord has been immensely popular - many of our old customers have been coming back to try it out, and many new customers have arrived to give EQ a try. Our simultaneous usage numbers are quite high, but in addition the people who are online are also playing more and for longer than usual. Gates of Discord introduced many new instanced zones, high level content, and re-introduced the casino - this type of content is particularly taxing on our servers, and coupled with the unusually high usage, we're seeing a resulting instability during our peak times.
Our first effort was to remove the casino, which improved our server stability. Since then, we've been working on two different fixes, the first of which will go live at the 3am patch Wednesday morning (Tuesday night). The second will be later this week. Both of them are meant to improve performance during peak times and address the 1017 errors that you may be experiencing. Each of them we expect to be an improvement on connectivity, and we expect our second fix to resolve the problems.
We apologize for our service instability in the past week; we're working hard on this problem - it's cutting into our play time too. :)
We'll give you another update in the next day or two as we make progress, and let you know how things are coming.
Brenlo the 1017 Slayer