Lok'Tar Humans! We of the Allakhazam Content Team at ZAM are running an iLvL219 contest over the next couple of weeks to celebrate the Hallows Eve event in World of Warcraft.

This means you have some work ahead of you for the BoP drops in the chest. That's right, you are being sent on a quest to find 20 various items within the world of Azeroth between Thursday, October 22nd at 12:00pm PST and and 11:59am PST, October 31st (Halloween). The loot will be some enhancements to your profile in the form of [Enchant Account:Premium (1 year)], [Enchant Account:Premium (6 months)], [Enchant Account:Premium (3 months)] and [Greater Allakhazam Loot Card: 2 Months of WoW Game Time on Us].

UPDATE: "Due to issues with the instance servers crashing, we're going to reschedule the Icecrown Gunship Battle encounter for a future time," Daelodev said.

Icecrown Citadel raid tests are currently scheduled to be held tonight and tomorrow on both the North American and European test realms. Players on the US PTRs get to fight Festergut tonight at 7 p.m. EDT and participate in the Icecrown Gunship Battle tomorrow, Oct. 22, at 7 p.m. EDT. European players will battle Rotface tonight at 7:30 p.m. CEST and get their own gunship battle tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. CEST. Only normal difficulties will be tested, but 10- and 25-player raids will be available.

Remember, testing schedules can change at a moment's notice and things can break on the PTR at any time. Keep an eye on both the North American and European test realm forums for the latest raid testing schedule. More information on the Frozen Throne raid dungeon can be found on the preview page.

We have a ton of links to share with you in this week's recap of our exclusive content and noteworthy news items (which can be found after the jump). With the holiday season upon us, most MMOs are celebrating with numerous events. Some, such as World of Warcraft's Feast of Winter Veil, are listed below. Whichever game you play, take some time to enjoy the festivities. Also, feel free to browse our news archive to check out everything that couldn't fit in this weekly recap.

Allakhazam Features

Dangers of Sanrio Town : Hello Kitty Online features an in-depth social network. While it's a good tool for meeting other players, it could be dangerous for the game's younger fans.

Ten Years of Lineage II : Sam Han, Lineage II Producer for NCsoft West, and Young Park, the original Lineage Production Assistant for NCsoft West, talk with us about the Lineage franchise.

Jumpgate Evolution Media #3 : These exclusive screenshots showcase fighters class ships and factories that are used in crafting.

Swordsman Screenshots : We take an in-depth look at this class from IGG's free-to-play Zu Online.

Station Crap : Allakhazam Editor-in-Chief Andrew "Tamat" Beegle has a less than favorable personal opinion on SOE's new Station Cash microtransaction service. What do you think about it? Let us know in the comments section.

You may have noticed on the WoW login screen that Blizzard performed restarts this morning on all servers.

We will be performing restarts on all US realms on Thursday, November 27, beginning at 5:00am PST and all Oceanic realms at 12:00pm PST (7:00am AEST, November 28). Each realm will be down for approximately 15 minutes and the overall process last about 1 hour.

According to Zarhym, this was to address a bug in Wintergrasp that was allowing one faction to dominate the other (free experience bonus, honor, shards, etc.). The PvP zone should be acting normally now.

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted two similar threads in the damage dealing forum on the O-Boards regarding warlock and hunter arena issues. He's asking the community to summarize as concisely as possible what needs to be changed for each class in arena.

You don't have to play a lock/hunter to post here. But I am only interested in a discussion of mechanics, problems, ideas and solutions.

While there are obviously no concrete changes yet, this means that the dev team is looking to improve (or at least change) how these classes perform in arena. You can read the warlock thread here and the hunter thread here.

What do you think needs to be changed? Visit our hunter and warlock forums to dicuss the topic.

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has outlined some changes that elemental shamans will be receiving in the next minor content patch. These changes are in addition to the previously mentioned AoE changes that will remove the threat component from Fire Nova Totem and Magma Totem and the increase the damage from Magma Totem.

Our goal was to streamline a few of the utility-based talents while giving shamans a little more damage scaling in later tiers of gear.

One of the changes is a Shamanism, a new 5-point talent. Your Lightning Bolt and Lava Burst gain an additional percentage of your bonus damage. Ghostcrawler said the numbers have not been finalized, but it will probably be around 10% for Lightning Bolt and 20% for Lava Burst at max ranks.

You can read the rest of the changes here or below.

According to Crygil on the O-Boards, the Archavon encounter in Wintergrasp is going to undergo some changes.

Due to the high quality of the items attainable through the Archavon encounter in Wintergrasp, we are going to be making some changes. To keep the encounter in line with the rewards, we have changed the Raid Lock from a 3-day to a 7-day timer. Additionally, we have raised Archavon’s hit points, in heroic, to keep the quality of item on par with the challenge of the encounter.

Top guilds Nihilum and SK Gaming joined forces under the name TwentyFifthNovember to demolish Wrath of the Lich King's content in a surprisingly short amount of time. Well, Nov. 25 is now here, and they have declared their official guild name to be Ensidia.

The first post on their new Web site, which will be updated to contain a guild web portal within the week, voices concern that WoW has become too easy.

Indeed Blizzard said the initial content will be easy. But how easy should it be? We need to ask ourselves if this is the route we want WoW to take. Everyone in the community owes it to themselves and Blizzard to put this game to the test and ask the right questions. Only then can we help them elevate the MMORPG gaming experience to its next level.

You can read the full blog post below. Honestly, I suppose any game would be easy if you had the drive and manpower to complete the content. Regardless, the "easy" level of WotLK has been a topic of debate since its release, and I'm sure will continue to be discussed as people try out the new end-game content.

It looks like Blizzard is going to help shamans, rogues and druids get in on the AoE (area of effect damage, or hitting many mobs at once) fun to make them more useful in dungeons. Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has acknowledged that many players are using AoE abilities to clear dungeons, and they're going to leave that tactic alone for now unless it gets too out of hand in heroics and raids.

Shaman – we are removing the threat component from Fire Nova Totem and Magma Totem and increasing the damage from Magma Totem.

Rogue – we are removing the cooldown from Fan of Knives and adjusting the damage calculation slightly to make daggers more useful for this ability.

Druid – we are adding Swipe (Cat) as a baseline ability.

These changes are coming in the next minor content update. Read the full post here or below.

I was playing on Llane when it went down without explanation around 12:30 p.m. EST. It looks like it wasn't just my realm. According to this announcement, 36 servers in the Vindication and Ruin battlegroups are currently down with no notice of when they might come back up.

We're aware that players are currently unable to log in to the following realms and we're in the process of investigating. We will provide further updates when they are available.

The full list of affected servers is after the jump.

UPDATE:  Around 3:44 p.m. EST, Bornakk posted that the issues have been resolved and the servers are currently being brought back online and should be playable soon.