Age of Conan is celebrating its one-year anniversary this week, and Funcom has a ton of Hyborian festivities planned for the occasion. All of the events can be found in today's newsletter.

To kick off the anniversary, Game Director Craig Morrison has reflected on the past year in a letter to the community. He gives his greatest thanks to the game's players and said that being given the responsibility of leading the team "has been the greatest honour." He also talks about the upcoming update 1.05, which is currently on the test servers. It will include a large new outdoor playfield with dozens of new quests; a new RPG system; and ability, spell and feat updates for all classes.

As for the events, all characters will be given a fireworks item that can be ignited once every eight hours, and all players who have accumulated at least six months of play time will get an extra character slot when Update 5 goes live. You also have until Wednesday to submit a drawing, poem, song or video to win a custom forum avatar and title on the official forums. And there's even AoC contests going on at Game-Rigs.com and Machinima.com. All of the information can be found in the newsletter.