My boyfriend and I went thursday (the 11th), and it was the first time for both of us. We had a great time, though i don't know if it honestly lived up to the hype or if i was just so glad to have a night away from kids that it made it less dissappointing. We did early entry into IoA around 4. The lines weren't bad over there and we got to do a few rides and just do a walk through of the park. Harry Potter was the highlight for sure! There was no crossing over to universal from ioa, so we headed over there around 6 and was pleased that people were already going in. We headed straight to walking dead as that was the house we wanted to see the most. Walked straight in, no wait at all. To be honest, it was not as good as I had hoped. The atmosphere may have been better when it was actually dark. It was nice that it seemed true to the show, but i kept waiting for the hoard of zombies to attack and it just never happened. We then went to penn and teller. It was fun. The "christmas light" area/people were good. My favorite was actually the last one we did, Dead End. I liked the whole set up of walking into a spooky house. We did all the houses except alice cooper. Which we could have done but we decided to do a few rides instead (rip, ride, rockit, and the mummy twice) and we skipped the shows also. We would have liked to have express passes, but we didn't really NEED them. Our longest wait was for silent hill and that was about 75 minutes. We also left the park for about 45 minutes and went over to citywalk to eat at moes. And as a newbie, I don't know that there would have been a real difference in having scarezones and having the scareactors everywhere. We walked through certain places that had a lot of them, but a lot of areas you saw nobody for a long time. Overall we really did have a great time and I think next year we will be better prepared to get even more out of the experience.