From the EQ2 Forums:

Due to the EQII Russian server merge (The Nexus and Barren Sky) on January 25, 2011, chat services will be unavailable for Valor (DE), Storms (FR), Splitpaw (UK) and Harla Dar (RU) for at least 12 hours.

We expect chat to be affected from 3:30 PM PDT on 01/25/11 until 4:30 AM PDT on 01/26/11 (26/01/11 00:30 –  26/01/11 13:30 C.E.T ~ 01/25/11 11:30 PM – 01/26/11 12:30 PM London time).

This announcement did not mention Runnyeye or Innovation, but we’re assuming they will be affected as well. Update: Runnyeye and Innovation are not affected because they are not located in the US.

Akella has announced that the two Russian PvE EQ2 Servers (Nexus and Barren Sky) will merge on January 25, 2011.

• Announcement on EQ2 Russia Forums
• Announcement (through Google Translate)

If you left a character in the Frostfell Wonderland Village and that character has been inaccessible since Frostfell concluded, you’ll be happy to read these updates from Bunji:

We’re working on freeing those toons right now.

Script is running now to relocate those stuck toons.

Ashlanne has posted this over on Station.com:

Beginning at 12am PST on Tuesday, January 11th, ALL SOE games, subscription and commerce services will be unavailable for maintenance. We expect this maintenance to take approximately ten hours.

This might cause some forum accounts to temporarily lose permissions, due to the inability to verify account status while the maintenance is taking place. This is only temporary and normal permissions will return automatically once the maintenance is complete.

We apologize for this interruption and will resume the affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.

I suspect this has something to do with DC Universe Online which launches worldwide on 1-11-11 but that’s just a guess on my part.

Update:  News of this downtime has now been posted on Everquest2.com with conflicting estimates of how long things will be down:

An unexpected server downtime has been reported with login and authentication servers offline. More as we have it.

A tongue-in-cheek Update from Brasse:

Tha Internetz are down at SOE-SD. My team would be happier about it if it did not impact their ongoing “testing” of Dungeon Overlord.!

Update 1:22pm PST: Login & Authentication Servers are back online.

It looks like those plans to merge Lucan D’Lere with Crushbone weren’t quite so preliminary and subject to player input. From SmokeJumper:

It’s official. We’ll be doing the merge that Rothgar describes. LDL will merge with Crushbone. Sometime in early February, preferably. (It’ll take a bit to get everything set up for it.)

Rothgar has put forth a possible server merge scenario for folks on the Lucan D’Lere server. This is not a merger that would be taken lightly, as Lucan D’Lere is a Role-play server and there is currently no server that its members could merge to that wouldn’t result in an overpopulated server. It will be interesting to read player reaction to the idea of merging with a non-RP server.

EQ2 Servers are back up after an extended update.

EQ2 Live Servers are offline for an extended window for today’s hotfix. an unscheduled downtime. More as we have it.

• Antonia Bayle(is currently locked)
• Butcherblock(is currently locked)
• Everfrost(is currently locked)
• Freeport(is currently locked)
• Guk(is currently locked)
• Lucan DLere(is currently locked)
• Nagafen(is currently locked)
• Splitpaw(is currently locked)
• Storms(is currently locked)
• The Bazaar(is currently locked)
• Unrest(is currently locked)
• Valor(is currently locked)
• Vox(is currently locked)

Here are your exceptionally brief Update Notes for today, January 6, 2011:

ITEMS

The following adornments should now properly display what slots they can adorn:

• Focus: Lesser Intimidation
• Focus: Lesser Power
• Focus: Lesser Vengeance
• Focus: Lesser Effectiveness
• Focus: Lesser Resilience

Here are your blink-and-you-missed-it Update Notes for today, January 4th, 2011:

GENERAL

• Escrow deposit log entries will now be combined properly when a player makes a deposit if the player’s name or ID changed due to a server transfer or server merge.

QUESTS

• Freebloods can now complete the Heritage quest “The Journey is Half the Fun“.

The new Freeblood race has a special “Ferocity of the Freeblood”, as well as access to housing “Freeblood Lair” and “Swarm of Bats” mount/buff. The details of how these are unlocked and what issues players will face if they change race have been addressed in different posts over the last 24 hours. Here are the highlights. Also inside, a glimpse of something we have heard rumors about before — that some new feature is coming to EQ2 housing with the release of the Destiny of Velious expansion.

Here are some news items we missed in the flurry of Server Merge and Freeblood news. They include Shaders 3 and Halas buildings, the look of the Freeblood, and Loitering NPCs in Freeport and Qeynos.

Players on Butcherblock, Crushbone, Everfrost, Unrest, and Guk just received the following message:

Greetings Norrath! The server will be coming down for a brief update at 02:30 PM PST [22:30 GMT] Wednesday December 22, 2010. Please find a safe place to log out before the server comes down.

We’ll let you know when we find out the cause of this unexpected downtime.

UPDATE: This update is apparently to address an issue with illusion forms and will require the servers to be offline for approximately 1 hour. Amnerys has posted an announcement.

Here are your hotfix notes for December 22, 2010:

GENERAL

Fixed some issues which could cause raid zones to crash.

I’ve finally managed to escape Charles de Gaulle airport which completely ground to a halt due to 3 inches (7cm) of snow. Meanwhile, our SAS pilot made a perfect landing in near whiteout conditions with heavy snowfall on a runway and at an airport positively blanketed with snow. Ah… Copenhagen… 😉

Anyway, ’bout those server merges…

Here are your update notes for December 21, 2010:

GENERAL

• This year you can support the Child’s Play charity by purchasing the new Cloak of the Snowfall from the Station Marketplace!

ITEMS

• Auto-consumed items such as the server merge titles will now be consumed on login if they were added while the player was offline.

AMENITES

Research Assistant amenities can no longer be purchased in a guild hall.

The latest from Rothgar on the merge:

Oasis should be unlocking now.

8 hours ahead of schedule isn’t bad!

Here’s the latest update from Rothgar:

Update:

Both merges are still going great, no issues so far.  We hope to have the chat portion of the merge done in 2 or 3 hours.

FYI, this will be the last merge of the year.

Update from Rothgar as of 1:49pm PST:

Update:

We’re ahead of schedule on the merges today.  Chat should be back up any minute now and the servers are being QA’d as we speak.  Hopefully if there are no QA issues we will have the servers unlocked in an hour or two.

Also, if you happen to have characters on both of the servers that are being merged into one, Rothgar explains what happens with the shared bank:

If you have characters on both servers that are being merged, and both characters have items in the shared bank, one of the banks will have it’s contents put in your overflow.  This is because we can’t merge the two shared banks into one bank due to slot conflicts.  So if you log in and find stuff in your overflow, thats most likely the cause.  Everything else should merge fine.

Befallen/Oasis and Nektulos/Guk (BONG for short 😉 ) Server Merges are underway.

From Rothgar:

Everything is going great on merge 1. Set to begin merge 2 in 20 minutes.

Everything is still on schedule. I’ll update again in the morning.

Our updates will be spotty as I was affected by airport weather delays. Best of luck to Rothgar, Zoltaroth, and all merging players. 🙂

Those servers which have completed their merges are experiencing crowding in main chat channels, specifically 1-9 and auction. Fortunately, some adjustments are being made to resolve the matter. From Zoltaroth:

We are looking into increasing the channel limits.

and later:

We have identified the issue and are working on a fix.

Barring any other major news, we’ll be rather content-light until just prior to Sunday night’s server merges. Just got back from the Eiffel Tower. Peace. 🙂

Latest update from Zoltaroth:

Update:

Butcherblock should be open within the next 15 minutes.

Permafrost is going into QA.

Also, I can personally confirm that Butcherblock is in fact back online right this second. I’m logged in and checking out the new digs. 🙂

And this in as well from Zoltaroth:

We are opening up Permafrost now.

And we have confirmation from Quesera in the comments that Permafrost is up.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Butcherblock looks good so far.  QA is still working on it but no major issues yet.

Permafrost is almost ready to come up for QA testing as well.

All in all we are ahead of schedule and everything is looking good.

From Zoltaroth:

We are bringing up BB shortly, once it is up QA will be doing their testing so if that goes well it should be open in a few hours.

Permafrost is waiting on Chat server meges to complete we expect about 3pm for that to be done.

Here’s our latest update from Rothgar:

Both merges are still on track and actually running a little ahead of schedule. However, we can’t start QA until we have the chat merge done. I’ll be out of the office soon so I’ll see if Zoltaroth can keep you guys updated.