Patch Scheduled February 19, 2014

Not officially announced but 99% likely.  From the February 13 Developer Chat:

JenarieEQ: easy question piestro - is there a date for patch or is 'sometime next week but not monday' still the best guestimate  :)
Piestro [EQ Community Relations]: Patch will be on the 19th Jenarie *99%*

EQ Developer Chat Transcript

On February 13, 2014, SOE had a EQ Developer chat where players could ask the Devs questions.  Here is a link to the transcript of the chat:

EQ Resource: February 13, 2014 - EverQuest Developer Chat Transcript

UCS Stability Change

The Universal Chat Service (UCS) has been unstable, failing, and causing massive spam for about a month or more now.

SOE has finally addressed players regarding the issue by posting:

As may know, we have been occasionally running into UChat issues where for periods of time the chat service will continually reconnect. We are continuing to investigate these issues and in an attempt to help with the stability of this server we will be switching the server back to a limit of 200 players per channel.

This change will go into effect later this afternoon.

We will also continue to monitor the servers and continue reviewing our diagnostics tools to see where we can address the stability issues.

We understand how important UChat is and we're asking that you please let us know in this thread if you see anymore issues (or if the problem persists).

Jenn Chan
Technical Director, EverQuest