To Dusty, this year wasn't bad, it just didn't play out very well. Players always complain, no matter what. The problem as I see it is not that there's not a lot of items to get, or because it's difficult. There's 3 ways to get the candy: ghosts, goblin, and pumpkin. Everyone complains about the time consumption, but that's not the problem. The problem is the difficulty factor. The ghosts most of the time do not have a candy in them, and when they do, there's going to be multiple people trying to get that 1 candy too. The pumpkin causes mass amounts of people to come, which is great, except for the fact that you can't walk over other people in PK zones. This makes trying to maneuver through all the people near-impossible. When the candy does come out, people usually end up getting hardly any, or a lot. There lies the problem; it should have a zone around it where players can walk over each other, but still PK. The problem isn't that it's time consuming, but rather that the difficulty from how it was all executed. I'd prefer if the ghosts randomly dropped the candy, rather than catching it in a net; they would have the same candy rate as they do now, it would just randomly drop it on the ground to be picked up. Another idea that wasn't great was alowing players to give multiple candies at once to a trick-or-treater. It sounds cool, but it won't ever play out very well; no matter how many prizes are available. Furniture also doesn't seem like a very good item to get as a prize. People would love to just buy as much as they want. Now on to my ideas for next year.
As for tricks, I think they're cool, and mostly everyone else does too. In fact, the past couple years, I'd hope for a trick sometimes. I suggest creating other ways of getting tricked, besides only using your candy. There's a few mirrors in Graal, there could be a system that if a player is looking in the mirror, randomly, it will apear to crack, or there may be a 'ghost cat' type-NPC that roams the map, and when it passes a player, they too get tricked. These tricks would last longer than the tricks from trick-or-treating. It would be a nice, easy, interactive activity going across Graal. I'd also recommend that you not be able to give candy to a trick-or-treater while you're tricked, depending on how long you remain tricked. Everyone loved the witch that went around during previous halloweens. This caused people to hunt for it, and win the prize, which was a simple prize, yet took people a while to get sometimes. It would be great to do that every year, obviously with something new, but it would just be 1 item you get from it. For example, this cat mount that was made this year - there would be a cat that appears in random locations of the map, and you would have to do something to get the prize (the cat mount). Whether it be feed it cat nip and hope the cat likes it, or answer a question about halloween like the previous one did. If you get the question wrong, or it doesn't like the cat nip, or whatever other thing you can think of to do to obtain the prize, you would then be tricked. Tricks are the hidden gem in Classic's halloween. There's some pretty cool tricks you could play that make people laugh and enjoy it. A trick I just thought of was a headless horseman-type trick - there would be a gani where the player is holding their head in their hands, or it's just completely gone. There could be a trick where a ghost follows you around and does something like steal your hat and put it on himself, all different kinds of things. I honestly think tricks could be the best part of halloween, and secondary would be getting prizes from trick-or-treaters. That way you wouldn't need as many prizes, but still have plenty of activities that can keep players busy, rather than activities that focus solely on obtaining a reward.