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.

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted on the O-Boards that the coefficients of the Warlock spells Corruption and Immolate were hotfixed last Thursday.

Corruption's coefficient went from 0.156 to 0.20.
Immolate's coefficient went from 0.13 to 0.20.

This ends up being a reasonably significant dps buff to all 3 specs. In our preliminary testing, Demonology may have benefited the most.

Since there are now forums for both Warlocks and damage dealing on the O-Boards, there are threads here and here on the subject. You can also discuss it in our Allakhazam Warlock forum in this thread.

MMO Portal has put together its 2009 MMO Calendar featuring autographed artwork from numerous games. The list includes Age of Conan, DC Universe Online, Dofus, EVE Online, EverQuest II, Free Realms, Guild Wars, Pirates of the Burning Sea, RuneScape, The Agency, Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft.

All of the proceeds go directly to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which treats children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases.

Also, everyone who purchases a calendar will be entered to win one of 10 prizes for each game, including boxed copies, premium accounts, 30- and 60-day passes, closed beta accounts and more. More information can be found here.

Happy Halloween! Blizzard has selected the top five pumpkins in its annual pumpkin-carving contest. Each winner will receive a Logitech G51 Surround Sound Speaker System.

You can browse the entire photo gallery, which also contains 18 honorable mentions.

Are you doing anything Blizzard-related today for Halloween? Let us know.

For all you rich players who are worried about losing a chunk of your hard-earned gold if you transfer from your server, Blizzard has responded to your fears.

Starting Nov. 4 after weekly maintenance, the gold limit for paid character transfers for characters level 70 or higher will be increased from 10,000 to 20,000 gold in preparation for Wrath of the Lich King. This will also apply to free character transfers when they're offered. If you have more than 20,000 gold, I suppose you're still out of luck.

The full announcement can be found here or after the jump.

Nethaera has spoken !

Since the release of the latest patch, Echoes of Doom, we have gone through a series of optimizations in order to increase overall game performance. We've seen steady, stable populations and a flurry of activity and excitement during the Hallow's End event and the latest rumblings of zombie attacks. It's been an exciting time for us as we draw closer to the release of our second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

We've reached a point where we feel we can now accurately evaluate the events since the patch release. Though overall downtime has been minimal, players have experienced latency, inaccessible instances, and general frustrations. We are therefore announcing that we will be issuing compensation to accounts in all realms in the US, Oceanic, and Latin American regions. Accounts that are currently active and in good standing will be credited with an additional three days of game time.

We would like to thank you for your patience during this time and look forward to seeing you in game!

Let's see those complainers come out and take back their criticism of Blizzard's handling of the entire situation!

[Edit: This credit also applies to European and Russian subscribers.]

With the upcoming release of Wrath of the Lich King, the Blizzard developers have decided to scrap their class forums on the O-Boards on Nov. 6 and create three role-based forums for tanking, damage-dealing and healing.

According to Nethaera, the purpose of this change is to set common ground for common goals, celebrate diversity and help the devs help you.

Nethaera's full post can be found here or below. Of course, this is a perfect time to remind the Allakhazam community that we have our very own World of Warcraft class forums. Our general forum is great for all WoW-related topics, but our class forums allow you to focus your discussion to specific talents, concerns, items, ideas, etc.

UPDATE: Allakhazam posters Eindrachen and Ryshenron have pointed out that Blizzard has decided the class forums will stay along with the new role-based forums.