Day One:
The line to get into the conference in the morning was kind of a mess. The line on day two worked out differently, which was probably very frustrating to the people who thought the line would work the same was as day one (I gambled and won on day two being very near the front of the line to get in).
As I entered the conference all for the first time, I encountered immediate stimulus overload. The conference hall(s) were huge and everything look fabulous. It was dreamy. The downside: the entire place is near pitch dark the entire time. You can’t read or write without a flashlight of some sort.
There were quite a few impenetrably long lines (1-6 hours) for: Blizzard store, Diablo III Play, Jinx store (Murloc plushy), and the main food line. Brady Games was offering a “real life” quest at the conference, but they were completely unable to deal with the interest it generated. They ran out of the required punch cards and there were huge lines to redeem for the prizes.
The Jinx Murloc was extremely popular (probably the most coveted item that seemed out of reach), but word is that it will be available online by the end of October or so. Vendors that had freebies and/or popular items seemed thoroughly unprepared for fifteen thousand attendees.
The hardest decision of the conference: Miss panels to wait in line or avoid lines and attend panels? This was a reoccurring theme throughout!
The opening ceremonies were okay. The crowd had a hard time settling down (i.e. not being obnoxious). I wasn’t personally surprised by the lack of major announcements due to the timing of the WotLK release relative to Blizzcon, but many people seemed to expect major announcements.
First WoW Panel: WoW UI. This panel was on how some of the WotLK UI decisions were made and was only moderately interesting. After the Q & A I went up to one of the developers and got a question answered that I didn’t expect, which ended up being the highlight of the conference for me (my question: Is it okay to create commercial (for-profit) addons? Answer: yes).
The Starcraft 2 game play panel (what I saw of it after standing in the food line for too long) was on the single player game, not multi-player, which was a disappointment.
In general, the (WoW specific) audience question quality was all over the map. Some people at least kept up with WoW news and played the beta so they didn’t embarrass themselves, others were awful. How can you ask truly useful questions about classes on live that are completely changing in two days or ask questions about classes on PTR/beta that aren’t finished yet? The answer: not very well at all. The game designers did an admirable job of humoring people. I very much appreciated the people who managed to ask insightful questions.
The Ghostcrawler introduction was one of the highlights of the conference for me. That was a secret that was kept well and a reveal that was well executed.
With WoW, Blizzard is really on top of player feedback. They try a lot of solutions that get rejected internally and never see the light of day, yet they make a ton of forward movement in the right direction. This was extremely impressive to me. I was already a Blizzard fanboy, but this still impressed the hell out of me. Blizzard is pretty on top of what the WoW customer base wants and had ready answers for almost all questions. The major sticky point was when they knew of a problem, but had not yet landed on an implemented solution that they were happy with yet. It’s hard to come to this positive conclusion about Blizzard after listening to so many people complain about the game, but seeing Blizzard effectively answering customer questions directly showed they are doing an awesome job of listening to the complaints and solving problems.
Watching tournaments (WoW Arenas, Starcraft, Warcraft) live is fun, but the room for improvement is massive. Even with multiple massive size screens and announcers, it’s still not easy to follow the action in a meaningful way.
The vendor area was kind of a mess. There are way too many people (attendees). It was hard to see what was going on. I avoided the vendor area as much as possible, except to walk through a couple times to see if there was anything interesting to see (mostly: no).
A guy in the /silly contest was wearing a shirt with the word “Epic” and an up arrow (in purple) and below that the word “Legendary” and a down arrow (in orange). His one liner was lame, but he might have won on just the shirt alone if he would have went with it.
The costume and dance contest (and even the /silly contest) were amazing to watch live. Anything other than high quality video with audio can’t do it justice. The photos currently available online are not representative of how enjoyable this was.
Day Two:
I lucked out in line to get into the conference. I gambled that the line would work differently on day two and that gamble paid off very handsomely.
Because I got in early, I made it to the Blizzard Store early and was out of there with my loot within a half an hour, just in time to make the WoW PvP panel. After hearing stories of people standing in the Blizzard Store line for six hours, this was one of my biggest personal victories of the conference.
The WoW PvP & Raid panels were excellent and exciting. I loved the battleground/Wintergrasp/dungeon/raid demos. Nothing in the panels was necessarily “must see”, but they were excellent demos.
I originally planned to go to the WoW Q & A panel, instead of “The Guild” panel (even though I really like “The Guild”), but I changed my mind at the last minute. I was somewhat tired of hearing WoW Q & A questions and I figured the Q & A panel would be the easiest to read about on the Internet after the fact. The Guild panel was extremely entertaining and I feel like I definitely made the right choice. The line to get into The Guild panel was the only serious line for a panel I experienced the whole time, which is frankly amazing.
In the early afternoon, exhaustion set in - I headed to bed immediately after the closing ceremony and barely made it that long.
The “WoW Class Discussion” panel on the second day was a duplicate of the same thing on the first day, so that was a disappointment. It opened a window of opportunity for me to eat dinner though, so that was nice. For whatever reason, the main food line was much better then on day two. I also spent some of that time watching other people play WotLK and D3 (watching people play SC2 was not fun).
The cinematics panel was interesting and semi-accessible to graphics noobs.
Overall, I didn’t care much for the closing ceremonies. They weren’t boring, but they were entirely skippable, except the audio and video quality was pretty amazing.
I never found much time to watch tourney matches, especially on day two. I also never succeeded at a game play line because they were best when the popular panels were going on and I just wasn’t willing to miss a panel to play stuff with major constraints.
General observations:
The Starcraft panels ended up being thoroughly uninteresting to me. I don’t feel like enough of a Starcraft fanboy.
It was probably possible to spend ten of the twelve hours each day standing in line. A good deal of that was probably due to EBay resale potential and the ability to play games not available to the general public.
The only unpopular thing at the conference appeared to be the DirectTV booth.
If you wear a costume, it seems like you spend all your time posing for pictures.
The large majority of the individuals I encountered were thoughtful and considerate. The crowd could be brutally cruel though. Almost everyone I ran into was an introvert, which made me feel very comfortable.
After getting home and reading some of the coverage of Blizzcon 2008 on WoW Insider, the real experience is nothing like reading summaries after the fact. The real experience is a thousand times better.
It truly was an epic experience that I would recommend to anyone who is very into World of Warcraft. It wasn’t perfect, but it was amazing and very much met my highest expectations.