Thanks for taking the time to read my retrospective on BlizzCon and the community events that Rawrcast’s Crew was part of. Now we move on to The Raid documentary premier. You can find part one here and part two here.
Saturday Blizzcon, Day/Night 2.
Blizzcon day two was all about the ‘QQ’ and A, it was fun but too much QQ for me. Feel free to read some of Rawrcast’s other articles that covered it. This day was all about The Raid prescreening for myself and the attending Rawr Crew. I Wrapped up BlizzCon around 1:30. Arrived about 5:00 PM at the House of Blues and the Rawr Crew is already hustling to get things set up by the time doors open at 9:00 PM. Read more…
Welcome back to my coverage of BlizzCon and the after hours community events. Today is the first day of Blizzcon and the second night of events. You can catch up with the first article here.
Day One: Friday BlizzCon 2010
We start our day with the opening ceremonies. Why release the trailer for Cataclysm when BlizzCon is one week away? Demon Hunter Rocks though. Overall I would agree with most that Blizzard blew the proverbial load early on. So we move on to the rest of today’s happenings.
My wife, Laviolet, wants a book and autograph from Christie Golden, so does Eulixe, I hate BlizzLines, so I don’t go. Stompalina needs to go to the House of Blues for The Raid set up and informs me The Wych has a spot open at the Diablo 3 panel. I’m cool with that, the highlight of the opening ceremony was the Demon Hunter and I want to know more. Read more…
Disclaimer: if the diary didn’t have a heart shaped lock on it, this would be called Journal of a Community Fan. Over the next few days and articles, I hope to share my experience as a fan with other fans about meeting and partaking in some of the community events outside of Blizzcon. Please share your own experience in the comments below.
To say Blizzard’s event as a whole was meh, is understandable. Blizzard’s biggest announcement wasn’t Demon Hunter for Diablo, Blizzard Dota or Starcraft Bejeweled, it was BlizzLine! There were lines for everything, if you like to buy stuff, try a demo, like to eat? There’s a BlizzLine for it!
Blizzcon was fun on many points. If you love panels, there were plenty of them. Fans took the time to dress up and Blizzard took the time to pay people to dress up. The fans won the walking around costume contests hands down. I never knew a mail box gnome spy could be sexy. Read more…
While at the airport waiting for our plane to board, Sippycup and I found ourselves playing a little game. The objective of this game was to see who could pick out the WoW players among the crowd. Now, this is actually a lot harder than it seems. Although it was 6:30 am in the middle of SeaTac Airport on a Thursday, we were able to spot out several people that were on their way to BlizzCon. With our Starbucks coffee in hand we began to walk to the terminal. Behind us we could overhear a group of guys, probably in their early twenties. I would have thought nothing of them on any other occasion except that words coming out of their mouth were “Gate A, Gate A. Man, I can not wait to get to BlizzCon!” As I turned my head to see what they looked like, I noticed that they were all dressed the same. Khaki Cargo shorts, baseball hat (usually worn backwards), t-shirt, flip flops, and a backpack that looked like it was made for climbing Mt. Everest. Now I don’t know if this is more of a Seattle fad or if the majority of guys that play video games are required multiple sets of this outfit in their closet at all times. Read more…
With BlizzCon now well behind us, I finally have some time to sit down and share a few moments that happened to me during our visit. These moments captured the spirit of BlizzCon, communing with friends and guildies, finally meeting podcasters I have listened to for years, and meeting fantastic listeners. Indescribable moments that I will remember for the rest of my life.
1. The first moment comes to us Thursday evening. While waiting on our cab I laid eyes upon the most handsome bald man that ever smuggled promotional items into the US, The Wych. The entire Rawr Crew enjoyed Wych’s company most of the weekend (when he wasn’t busy doing “press stuff”), including the Curse VIP Party, Twisted Nether Meetup, The Raid Event, and of course Read more…
The Class Mechanics Panel was by far the best panel I attended at Blizzcon. At first, I was a little put out by the notion that there wasn’t going to be any type of presentation. After all, why waste my time listening to designers shoot down bad ideas…I could just read the forums for that. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Sure, there were a handful of “bad” questions that were brought up during the panel but overall, I couldn’t have been more impressed with both the designers and the players. The specifics of why certain abilities were nerfed/buffed was not nearly as interesting as the overall design philosophy that was displayed during the panel.
Firstly and most impressively, there were no questions that caught the panelists off guard. It was clear after they answered questions on every topic from Paladin class mechanics to Aspect of the Pack that the panelists had probably had hundreds of discussions about each topic. Their answers were reflexive, well reasoned and polished. It was truly inspiring to see the men who literally live and breath the mechanics of the game that we all love take their jobs so seriously!
Secondly (and this was only briefly discussed during the panel), I was fascinated by the “meta” balancing that occurs between the play styles of each class. If I’m recalling correctly, one of the questions that was asked during the panel was why Holy Paladins received another resource to balance with the follow up question of why have classes become so homogenized in WOW? Their response essentially boiled down to this: Roles in WOW were already homogenized into the basic triumvirate design of Tank, Healer and DPS when they first made the game. The only versatility that they have is how the classes heal, tank and DPS.
They went on to explain that Holy Paladins spend a the majority of their time managing resources; namely, the health of everyone in their raid as well as their mana pool. They felt Holy Power added an additional resources that players could balance in the reverse fashion of their mana conservation. They made the decision to add the additional resource after looking at exactly how the class played within their predetermined roll.
Overall, it was clear after the panel that the designers completely love this game and are extremely passionate about it. Their defense of their design and expectation of its players (it was evident that they seriously considered their answers and they expected players to seriously consider their questions…some did not and were humiliated as a result) shed some insight onto the real brains behind this title.
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Pignasty, Eulixe and Stomp recount their adventures at BlizzCon and ring in the era of the #TrueBromance. Along with Hafrot, they cover a few of the finer points of interest from the BlizzCon panels, as well as the conventions evening festivities including the Twisted Nether Meetup and The Raid Pre-Screening.
Links to topics discussed this week:
EXCLUSIVE THIS WEEK
Lands of Lore: Eulixe shares his most anticipated Lands of Lore segments yet - learn the legend behind the biggest, nastiest expansion boss yet, Deathwing.- #TrueBromance blossoms on our YouTube Channel
- WIN an x-52 Nether Rocket XTREME in the Red Rocket Rap Contest at rawrcast.com/rocket
- Much love goes out to TheWych of Bind on Equip. The entire Rawr Crew had an amazing time living Rock Star with ya, man. Till next year! #BeacuseHesTheWych
Special Thanks to our Sponsors
WootLoots.com & UGT-Servers.com use the code RAWRCAST for 10% off!
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Music Provided by: 311Erock on YouTube - Metal Cover of Lady Gaga - Bad Romance (#TrueBromance)
Let me start out by apologizing to you, the readers, for my tardiness. The flight home, and nursing my liver took longer then I anticipated. This will be parts 2 & 3 in one shot. If you haven’t read part one yet scope it out here.
I’m sitting on my flight back to Seattle bringing you the readers the finale in this year’s BlizzCon 2010. To recap my day one briefly, I was pretty under-whelmed with Blizzard’s presentation, and I wish I could say day two was a whole ton better. It wasn’t. I’m not the biggest PvP guy ever, back in the later half of Vanilla I did a lot of PvP because I had friends that did it. At the very end portion of Vanilla they switched to the point system from the high warlord grind, and some of the best PvP items of the time had some of the best PvE implications. So while the presentation that Blizzard threw out to the masses of PvP made me want to start doing some arenas, and some battlegrounds, it by no means is my bread and butter. As the title of the article states, it’s the PvE perspective.
Read more…
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