No one answered the question of the OP. I checked the announcement post again and didn't see an ETA. I also saw no mention of "24 hours" as previous posters stated.

The announcement is titled "Beta Patch V0.9 (3/11/2011)" which to me 3/11 was yesterday. Stating that the mandatory beta will be up for 24 hours(Where is this stated?) is useless without a from and to time. 24 hours from when?

I also searched and found nothing. Does anyone have an answer for the OP? Sorry to sound antsy.

It will be up when it's up. There is no ETA.

new players
 

Me and a friend just installed and started playing EQ for the first time in many many years only to find the server down, any chances you will open the live server for players under level 20 or something so we can play any time soon? :)

Thanks. :)

No, because then the server would just have 500 lvl 1s running around as if the server just opened up for the first time.

Play beta, you can start new iksars there

It's on the server list as Project 1999 Kunark Beta

Yeah, they never really said 24hr, but they said something along the lines of "It will be back up tomorrow evening".

Am I reading "Animal Farm"? The server message posted last night clearly stated it would return tonight. That would be an estimated time.

I'm just getting to that "scratchin' for my crack" point now. Fiance is out of town for the weekend and I have nothing else to do. I've played around some in beta but the global chat has devolved into BarrensChat version 2. Came to the server about 3 or 4 weeks ago and am trying to get a move on before actual expansion drops. I can't remember enough about my old EQ days to be useful in beta testing, and anything I have found being glitchy has already been brought to your attention. Basically I feel useless in beta, and unable to go dungeon crawling with friends.. What a great Saturday night.

It's your server and you can do whatever you want with it. But I think you'd do better with some sort of public goal rather than passively trying to wait people out. For example, if you said 'We'll turn the main server back on after 100 legitimate Kunark bugs are fixed and not before, even if it takes 2 weeks' I think the beta population would double in a few hours. We EQ players are just goal oriented achiever types.

/thread

That's seriously it.

Give me a list of bugs, broken quests, bad zones. I'd be all over it. What I'm not going to do is delve through 100's of threads trying to identify trouble areas, or run around the world playing popular content already tested by 500 people.

I need achievable goals outlined somewhere. Give me purpose.