From the EQ2 Forums:

As any MMO player knows, everything is more fun with friends. With that in mind, Sony Online Entertainment is rolling out their brand new Recruit Rewards program! Station Account holders can earn exclusive items just by inviting friends to join them in their favorite SOE games.* Here’s an overview of how the program works:

The Invite: Use the recruiter invite page to generate an email or a custom link that’s perfect for posting on social media (hint!). The message will include all the information your friend needs to get up and running in the game you’ve suggested. Currently, the Recruit Rewards Program includes EverQuest®, EverQuest 2®, and Planetside 2®, but DC Universe™ Online will be added soon.

If you have been abusing milking enjoying the Refer-a-Friend 300% XP bonus for its high speed leveling (and thus AA earning) goodness, especially by parking a level 1 trial account character at the zone-in, well, I’m afraid that has finally come to an end.

From Rich Waters 0n the EQ2 forums:

The Recruit-a-friend program is a great way for you to bring your friends into EverQuest II and help them level up a bit faster by playing together. When you group with a character you’ve recruited, you both gain a hefty 200% experience bonus. Unfortunately, many people were recruiting themselves and using it as a way to power-level their main character, rather than actually playing with a friend.

We’ve added a couple of limitations to the recruit-a-friend bonus to prevent it from being a solo leveling tool. In order to get the recruit-a-friend experience bonus:

So today marks the release of the Digital Download in North America and Canada. For those unfortunate souls who couldn’t get their hands on a retail copy, your expansion begins today.

Do you really miss anything by being a week late? Well, there are those server discoveries (which EQ2Players isn’t tracking properly). And there’s the chance of making a lot of plat being first to sell shinies, tradeskilled materials, rare items, etc.

We have received player reports but have not yet empirically confirmed ourselves that there may have been some monkeying around with how combat XP is converted to AA XP. This may be a bug, an oversight, or it may in fact be an intended change. But for now, if these player observations are true, then players joining the expansion today will not be following in their fellow player’s footsteps of briskly earning AAs and picking up levels 2 at a time. Here’s what we know…