Newbies discouraged by the difficulty of getting started in EverQuest can take heart: Sony has announced a battery of changes which are to have taken effect as of Friday, March 16. The changes underwent extensive testing on an offline server, and have been decided as follows:

• Players will no longer need to sit down and read a spell book in order to regain mana, reducing the difficulty of magic use.
• Level progression is sped up between the first and tenth levels, making it easier for new players to get actively involved in the game's community.
• Greater experience gained for characters lower than level 30.
• When characters under level 10 die, they will no longer need to hunt down their corpses in order to regain their equipment; everything appears intact at the player's bind point.

Several other adjustments have also been slated for the game's next update. The timing of these changes was geared to coincide with the third anniversary of EverQuest, which celebrated that milestone today. The game now services over 400,000 subscribers, ranking it high among current online RPGs worldwide.