The Hallow's End event has been going on for a few days now, and it's actually a lot more fun than every other seasonal event Blizzard has put in to the game. Yes, Brewfest had ram racing and beer goggles, but Hallow's End is just plain fun.

At the high end, you can take down the Headless Horseman every day, and he actually drops useful loot. The first day, I got both the Witching Band and the The Horseman's Signet Ring. His Horseman's Helm not only looks cool, and is useful, but also lets the wearer laugh like the Horseman. And this loot is not very hard to get at all. It's not as good as some of the uber-endgame loot, but it's pretty darn good. As a healer, the Witching Band is better than the Ring of Convalescence that many of us healers who haven't cleared Serpentshrine Cavern wear.

You can also get flying broom mounts from him: one that works in the Outlands, which you can actually fly around on, and one that works in the old world, which doesn't let you fly, but looks cool anyway.

On the lower end, the Horseman flies over the starting areas, dropping firebombs, and everyone can pitch in and put out the fires. Sure, you don't get epics, but you do get rep and some cash. On top of that, there's candy galore to get, and if you eat too much too fast, then you get a dubuff that makes you randomly throw up.

The whole event is fun, rather than work (such as collecting tickets, which is more or less another rep grind). It reinforces what's interesting about the game, and not what's repetitive about the game (although you could make the argument that more loot and/or the daily quest nature of the Horseman quest = repetitive). It's enjoyable to play in the event across the board, because it's easy and because the rewards are good, and because the activities are (at least at the lower end) are different.

I hope that Blizzard learns from the popularity of this event and the positive feedback they are getting from it. No one's saying that the whole game should be as easy as the Horseman or drop epics like he does (though easy-to-get epics = nice), but when the game is fun, everyone wins. People play more, enjoy playing, find the joy that we first had leveling our first characters, and Blizzard has happy players who will stick around longer and continue to pay them their monthly subscription fee.

The good people at Blizzard just released the patch notes for the upcoming 2.3 patch, and there are quite a few changes to the core gameplay of WoW. This isn't quite the same overhaul as the patch right before The Burning Crusade, but the changes are numerous and significant. Looking at the changes, I have to wonder though, is Blizzard making WoW significantly easier for those leveling from 1-60?

Some evidence:

As an altoholic myself, I can see the value of making it easier to level from 1-60. Unless you play on afternoon weekend hours, it can be quite difficult to find groups for any pre-TBC dungeons (except for the Deadmines, but there it's more often a 70 running through a low-level guildie alt). That makes it extremely difficult to get the good gear that is provided in dungeons, and to benefit from the experience and cash a dungeon instance provides.

But look at the total number of changes (just some of which are listed above), and suddenly it becomes much easier to go from 1-60. About 1/3 easier by XP alone, and more than that now that elites have been nerfed across the board and the drops they give have been improved to include things like +damage, +healing, or +crit, which were quite rare on items with a level below 55 before.

And, really, these changes are just on 20-60, so the "easy levels" of 1-20 aren't affected. It's quite easy to tear through 1-20, and it's in the early 20's that leveling tends to slow down a good deal. The cost to level increases and fewer people play in that 20-60 range.

An experienced WoW player should now be able to tear through 20-60, whether or not they do dungeon instances. If they do quests, they'll move even faster. The patch makes the whole process easier, even if this is your first character in the game. I'm not complaining — really! (My mage and warrior and shaman and pally and Horde alts all have a chance now of reaching 40, or 60, or even 70!) I'm just saying that I'm surprised at how far Blizz went with these changes. Everyone wants to join the big party at endgame, and now they'll be able to oh-so-much faster.

Maybe I should just hush and go farm for my bear mount instead.

I've only played WoW once in the last three weeks. That's a pretty long time for me (and most WoW players, particularly raiders), but I did see this piece of happy news: heroic badges will drop in Karazhan and Zul'Aman. Yay!

Heroic badges are great because they provide, with some effort, epic gear with some great bonuses. I love the healing on my Gavel of Pure Light (though I do wish the Maiden of Virtue would, some day, drop her Shard of the Virtuous for me). The problem is, you have to run heroic dungeons which are a) pretty tough and b) take a good chunk of time to run. I'm short on time and would rather spend my in-game time doing guild raids or catching up on some PvP action (or, heaven forbid, farming for mats for potions), so I don't get to do heroics very often. And they just aren't as fun as the 10-person raids. So heroics now dropping from KZ (which already drops epics left and right) is really great.

I'm not a crafter, so I don't miss the Primal Nethers like crafters will (and so crafters will need to continue to run heroics for those). Instead, I'll have more and better loot options for the work I'm already doing. That's a win-win.

I may not be the best player in WoW, but I do play quite a bit. I talk about it with my friends, much to my partner's chagrin, but here's how you know I'm a WoW geek: I let it seep in to my work all the time.

In addition to developing some pretty mean Web apps for eLearning at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, I also end up doing training for some of those apps. I'm a decent public speaker and if you have a technology person who can also communicate clearly and enthusiastically with the user base, you've got someone who's in fairly high demand.

So I'm prepping some training materials for a quiz/assessment tool that we're rolling out, and all of my example questions have to do with WoW. The screen shot on the right shows this (if you can actually read it). I'm curious to see with this new training material if anyone actually gets the references.

So we were running Gruul's Lair last night, and I was having a tough time not dying during the first Ground Slam -> Slow -> Shatter sequence. I know how to keep myself alive in most situations in the game, but in this particular encounter, you have to make sure that you're not near anyone, or you'll take damage that multiplies by the number of people who are around you. It's not fun.

I could never seem to get far enough away from enough people to not take serious damage or die. And I was suppose to be spam healing the main tanks all the while. Now, it didn't help that one of our rogues Cloak of Shadow-ed out of the Shatter, ran right past me, and killed me one time, but even in good circumstances, I had a tough time staying up and doing my job.

I think that part of the issue is that I just never developed those uber-fast gaming reflexes, and that when I play WoW, I tend to focus on one task very intently (like, say, not letting the MT die), sometimes to the detriment of the health of my characters. Mutli-tasking generally isn't a problem for me (it can't be, given what I do), so fights like this are right tough. It makes me feel all old.

I missed this article when it first came out, and there's not really data to back it up, but Wired makes the case that playing World of Warcraft can make you a more desirable job candidate. There are things about this statement that I wouldn't dispute.

Anyone who's played WoW for a long time will tell you that there are two key ingredients to successful game play: managing interpersonal interaction and problem solving. In WoW, you need to group with other people (5, 10, 25 or 40) to successfully accomplish many goals. If you don't know how to communicate effectively, it causes problems. If you don't know how to work well with others and not do everything your way with utter disregard for standard strategies and roles, it causes problems. If you're a dick, no one will group with you again. Sound like any office environments you know?

Playing WoW allows people to develop these skills. It also really calls on players to prioritize and problem solve on the fly. If a typical strategy for taking down an extremely difficult computer player in the game (a "boss" in WoW parlance) isn't working, then just repeating that strategy isn't going to fix things. You'll continually fail. You and your team needs to figure out how to do things differently and, ultimately, more efficiently (as there are limited resources at play &mash; you don't have unlimited health, you can't cast spells forever, your armor and gear deteriorates over time, bosses go berserk and become unstoppable after a certain amount of time). On an individual player level, you have to adjust priorities on the fly. For example, I'm supposed to heal the main tank (the one taking the most damage), but if things are going bad for someone else (say, someone who does a lot of damage) I need to heal them because without their contributions to damage, we'll never accomplish our goal. But if I don't heal the main tank, then he may be in trouble, so I have to adjust my priorities on the fly, choosing the most opportune moment to fire off a heal to others while also making sure I'm taking care of my main job: healing the main tank. If you can't adjust priorities on the fly, under pretty intense pressure, then you're not going to serve the team well, and you won't reach your goals. Again, sound like any office environments you know?

I really think that those without these skills (or a deficiency in these skills) do develop them, in part, from playing WoW. I know of a lot of older (age-wise) players who take younger (age-wise) players aside and let them know when they're communicating poorly or acting selfishly because they want to see them (and the teams they are on) succeed. Of course there are dicks in the game and there are people who blindly follow them because they don't think they can do (or deserve) better. But just like in real life, if you treat people well, they'll return the favor.

So can playing WoW make you a more desirable job candidate? Indirectly, perhaps. I doubt if I'd ever ask anyone if they played WoW, and if I did see "Guild Leader" on their resume, I'd probably ask them about it (being a guild leader is often a tough and thankless job — but that's a whole other post). Their responses about leadership, responsibility, and adapting to change would be what really mattered.

So my Kharazan raiding team downed Terestian Illhoof last night. I'm posting about it for two reasons:

1. Some teams have a lot of trouble with him, kind of like the Curator. We got him down on our second try last night, our fifth try overall. It's a very hyperactive fight, ending with you and those still alive getting pummeled by about 30 or so imps. Makes casting heals kinda tough. =)
2. There's a real sense of joy and accomplishment among teammates when you finally do take down a boss — any boss — in WoW. These fights take coordination, good communication, and strong focus from all involved. Like all projects, when everyone is executing on all cylinders, the project gets done faster and everyone feels good about the work that they've done.

So on the forums for my guild, the Infinite (Hyjal-US), there's been a bit of complaining about the expansion and, in particular, it presents all the same issues that the Burning Crusade brought up:

• It's more of the same.
• Greens are the new purple the moment you step in to the expansion.
• It's a waste of time to build any of your toons up because everything in the expansion is going to make your efforts now pointless.
• It's designed for the small fraction of uber, high-end raiding guilds who have completed all the Burning Crusade content.
• It's more of the same.

Now while I'd agree that it's more of the same, I think that this excellent commentary over on WoW Insider makes a great point: this is an expansion, not a new game. This is now WoW2 or some other new game. This is an expansion to the current game, its gameplay, and dynamics. While you could argue that an expansion to an MMO should bring about revolutions in game play because it is online and not limited by the classic distribution mechanisms of CDs/DVDs, it's still just an expansion to the current game.

I know that this slightly contradicts what I said in my post "Off to Northrend, Sooner or Later," but upon deeper reflection, the game is what it is. If you're tired or bored, then don't play it any more. There are lots of other fish in the sea. No one else may be playing them, but they're there for your enterainment. =)