Yes, this actually happened about a month ago. We were all stunned. Even though I've only been a steady player for about a year, I have felt the enormity of this loss. Brad helped shape not just an amazing world, but also a real community that is still going today, even if it's a teeny-tiny bit smaller than it once was.

If you play Live and can get to East Karana easily, there is (or at least was) a monument to his character Aradune. Instructions here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/everquest/comments/e66kex/ingame_tribute_to_brad_mcquaid/

I am sometimes unable to enter a new zone. It'll say "Entering such-and-such" zone and stay there. The Everquest load screen does not appear. After a minute or two it gives up, and informs me that the zone is unavailable. I believe it also returned me to the character select screen, at which point my character does start in the desired zone.

Is there any way to fix this? I run a private EQemu server and usually this is caused by a problem with the large map files in my emulator directory, NOT the small text files (ending in (_1, _2, _3) in the Everquest game directory. But I don't see how that would apply here, unless there's something wrong on the server side. I am running the ROF2 client and have applied the EZserver-specific text/patch files.