Michael Maddox - Fun Stuff

Blizzcon 2008 Trip Report

2008-10-13T14:01:29.6150000-07:00

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.

Violence in Video Games

2005-12-15T05:18:38.6093750-08:00

There are a ton of studies and literature that will tell you that violence in video games is bad for children. There is very little proposing the opposite. As a life long game player with zero violent tendencies, I have always found this confusing. This is the best article I've ever read about why violence in video games is not the end of the world:

Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked

The website that's hosting it is PBS and the author is a professor at MIT, which is a nice bonus.

Thanks to The Inquirer for the link.

AMD pokes fun at Intel's current generation of dual core processors

2005-11-18T05:26:34.4218750-08:00

Most of the top 10 requires a greater than average understanding of AMD's and Intel's current offerings and the competitive landscape. That being said, I "got" and at least smiled at every one. Disclosure: I am an AMD shareholder.

Top 10 Reasons Intel will not Participate in the Dual-Core Duel

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has a blog

2005-11-15T03:33:09.9062500-08:00

Sweet!

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/

A very fun and amazing Xbox 360 commercial

2005-11-14T07:24:29.0000000-08:00

http://dwl.xbox-scene.com/video/xbox360-ad.wmv

[Thanks to Peter Vader for the URL.]

Xbox 360 Backward Compatibility List Released

2005-11-13T05:28:40.7187500-08:00

http://www.agileprogrammer.com/dotnetguy/archive/2005/11/12/9474.aspx

I don't own an Xbox, but I've always intended to buy an Xbox 360 for a client to my Media Center PC if nothing else. I'm very pleased that Microsoft allowed the Xbox 360 to play many of the Xbox games.

A Sudoku tool to make hard and tough puzzles more enjoyable

2005-09-08T14:38:23.1406250-07:00

Dan Tull has created a wonderful Sudoku tool that makes Hard Sudoku puzzles less tedious, and Tough Sudoku puzzles possible!

You need to provide your own puzzle values, which is just takes a few double clicks and then you are off. It basically does the grunt work of eliminating the obvious impossible values for you.

It could take hours of tedious re-evaluation to solve a tough puzzle manually and tough puzzles seem to require some guess and check as well. With the tool, the re-evaluation is mostly free and guess is check is made much easier with the "Copy Puzzle" feature.

The tool is a Javascript application supported on IE, Firefox, and Safari. The Copy Puzzle feature doesn't currently work in IE however.

Excellent work all around Dan, Thanks! I'm still addicted, but at least I waste less time per day doing the harder puzzles. :)

Sudoku Logic Puzzles

2005-08-13T04:41:06.6406250-07:00

My step-father-in-law introduced me to Sudoku logic puzzles last weekend and I've been compulsively obsessed ever since. Here's the URL:

http://www.sudoku.com.au/

There are 3 new puzzles every day, one easy, one medium, and one hard. The easy ones I can do in less than 5 minutes. The hard ones I try to finish in less than 20 minutes, but I've spent over an hour on them before.

These puzzles have everything about logic puzzles that I loved as a kid without most of the bad parts. There is no math to do, yet it's number oriented. Most of the work is "process of elimination" oriented. It's very visually stimulating.

The biggest downside I've noticed so far is the first ~10 minutes of grunt work that goes into a hard puzzle. Being a programmer, I'd love to just code up an algorithm to do a first pass analysis for me which would save a ton of time, and eliminate the normal human mistakes. I'm not sure how that would affect the "fun factor" though.

The Dungeon Siege II demo is available

2005-08-05T02:50:31.4062500-07:00

I saw the announcement on The Inquirer. I was a huge fan of the first version (I liked it much more than Diablo II, which was an excellent game in its own right), so I assume I'll buy this one even if I don't have much time to play it.

Microsoft is listing the release date for the game as August 16th. W00t!

As an AMD shareholder, this is atrocious!

2005-06-30T14:55:52.2812500-07:00

The PDF containing the AMD-Intel Complaint

I have been an AMD shareholder for the past ~6 years (shortly after AMD successfully launched the first Athlon processor). I read a decent majority of the complaint linked above. It makes me want to cry.

AMD has apparently been working very hard to be successful and Intel has apparently been working very hard to stealthily kill AMD's chances to increase market share in the face of AMD's technical superiority across many mass market product lines. It's amazing how much of the plot AMD has reverse engineered. I'm sure it has taken years for AMD to gather all the information it has about Intel's intentionally stealthy plots. Hopefully, legal discovery will allow AMD to much more quickly build a lengthy fact filled case against Intel. If I was an Intel shareholder (i.e. naturally biased against AMD) and the judge for this case, I would be pretty persuaded to AMD's cause just by reading the complaint which is very damning of Intel.

I want to cry because over the last 5 years instead of seeing my AMD stock increase in value, I was (on paper) down ~90% at one point in time. If it turns out that was because of Intel doing very illegal things, I will be very angry. I did sell some of my AMD stock during the last 5 years and that sale was at a price that was (theoretically) lower than it would have been had Intel been (allegedly) competing in a legal and legitimate way. I don't think there is any way for me to be compensated for that loss though (the Enron shareholders obviously had it MUCH worse; I am starting to feel their pain).

I guess now is a good time for me to put my money behind my beliefs. I'd love to short Intel to zero. :)