ok do it

Not gonna lie here but there are people that find catching candy from ghosts enjoyable. It's just that lag that many people will complain from, just look at how bugs are (you see many people fighting for one bug). It also includes some competition that is equal for everyone which was one of the reason that many liked it, I believe.

I liked last year's trick-or-treating because it's the traditional, real-life way to trick or treat. You go to someone's house to get candy. I also liked catching ghosts because it's more competitive. Maybe both could happen? Forgive me while I ramble.

There could be two ways to get the same prizes. Last year's way would stay the same; collect candy from houses and use the candy to get goodie bags. However, instead of ghosts dropping candy they could drop some sort of other NPC-tradeable item (let's just say coins for now). This way you won't be able to use candy to get prizes from NPCs, and you won't be able to use coins to get goodie bags. It's obviously easier to get candy from houses than it is to catch ghosts, so goodie bags would be more expensive than trading coins to NPCs. Both ways would offer the same prizes, and hopefully since they require different methods to obtain said prizes it would be somewhat balanced.

Building upon my previous paragraph, perhaps instead of coins the ghosts could drop halloween-related items, such as bats, spiders, pumpkins, bones, etc. With these items you would have to find the NPCs who are looking for these specific items in order to receive your prize. Since you would be searching for the NPC that wants your item, this could be an alternative to the cooldown on candy trading as we have seen in previous years.

TL;DR: Do both, but tweak it a little to make it balanced.

How about this?

We can keep the "traditional" way of getting candy from houses.
But, those can be candies that are for "Regular Prizes".

There could be some sort of competitive way to obtain candy for "Rare Prizes".

"Normal Candy Box" can be bought with normal candy from house collecting.

And "Rare Candy Box" can be bought with rare candy, which you get from some sort of event.

I'll try to think of something that could be fun and unique this week.

An interesting idea would be instead of using player's homes we could have the bowls of candies in NPC houses? It would bring traffic to those desolate, mostly useless homes of NPC's and such.

Zone did this, and it led to players moving around the map a lot more rather than idling at start. This way it appeals to the actual holiday, and anyone can do it. There would be no hogging of ghosts for candy, and there'd be no searching for random homes of players. It would make the NPCs around the map much more lively too, they could dress up and talk to you when they give you candy.

I think this is a great in-between, and could be expanded upon as well.

Just some ideas. If all were added, it would be fun for everyone.
 

Okay, so for "rare" candy to be rare. The candy at houses will have to be "normal/regular" candy

What we can do is add a Giant Pumpkin Boss to spawn during Halloween, you can replace it with giant blob and change slimy spoils to "pumpkin spoils". You can trade those spoils with the witch to obtain rare candy.

Add a cat that runs around the map, which you need to catch with your bug net to give the witch her "missing" cat back. Make the spawn rate low. If you retrieve the cat and talk to witch, she will give you a "Golden" candy. The cat will be running around fast and will be hard to catch, especially with that server lag :p.

House collecting = regular candy
Giant Pumpkin spoils = rare candy, not sure how many pumpkin spoils should be needed to trade for a rare candy.
Cat = Golden candy.

Prizes?

Regular Candy Bag, Costs 10 candy: 5% chance to obtain a Halloween hat (Trick or Treat) (Average hats)

Rare Candy Bag, Costs 1 rare candy: 100% chance to obtain a rare Halloween hat

Super Rare Candy Bag, Costs 1 Golden Candy: 75% chance to obtain rare Halloween hat, 25% chance to obtain a Halloween mount (A good one...)

Edit!

Make Zombie baddies, and Pirate baddies have a 1% rare candy drop rate.

5% seems extremely low for a regular bag o-o

aside from that I really like the cat running about the map idea / getting stuff for the witch.
(maybe instead of giving you candy she gives you the making of what's in the cauldron - perhaps it's needed to enter another side event during October. Or an NPC needs it for something and you get a prize in return)

I don't particularly like the idea of having different bag types/candy types, for some reason I feel like that should be reserved for christmas only. That way there would be one simple bag to buy with your candies, no variety (since it's all Halloween related anyways) and it'd be fair & simple.

5% for 10 regular candies? Seems fair to me, when people can get 500+ candies from houses easily in one day.

Different bags are needed, otherwise people will be house hunting all day, and no one would bother waiting for a giant pumpkin to spawn for the "rare" hats.

Also, for the baddy/pirate zombies, make them as tough as the lizardons.

Still would like some kind of guild oriented event but I understand the complications. Could register a set number of people like GST, though I'm not sure entirely what this roster would go and do.

It was just as repetitive as every other activity on graal. bug catching, looting, spar, pk, tower.... And this event even had 2 parts: candy collecting from ghosts, and reverse trick-or--treat to npcs.

Having a restriction to the amount of people in guild that are able to enter the event at the same time (4 people at a time?). Once again, I'm down for a pumpkin boss or a zombie baddy. They've already done something like this too, the Giant Lizardon boss at Destiny Church is an example.

Boss could deal 2.5 damage. Boss gets distracted by aggro, have a guild member hit the boss and cause aggro. Repeat and don't die.

5% Way too low, I'm also against the house collectiong idea 100% due to it sucking so damn much. Its lazy, boring, and a waste of time. Also the cat idea sounds fun, except yeah the server lag and not to mention the crowds of people chasing one creature in one spot of the map causing god knows what amounts of lag. The pumpkin boss already is cool but adding that spoils thing would be neat, I thought it already dropped normal candy when killed though? Nonetheless, we do need to give the witch more life, let her do what she did before except 10x better, Id even like to fight the witch or the witches evil sisters, hell lets have a quest revolving around 10 different witches.

the cat could be a your account can only view it thing, so a different cat essentially for each account. especially if itd be a key to part of a witch quest, since everyone would need to get it without too much difficulty.

Wouldnt that be a pain though, I can only presume thag the cat will be roaming the entire map so will it seriously automatically only allow it to be that way?

The cat would be used to trade in for an "Ultra rare Halloween" mount... so it should be hard to catch.