Hey everyone. Just got back from Blizzcon this weekend. I'm sure a lot of you having been already been reading about the announcements made there, but I thought I'd post a few things I saw/learned there.

They said they sold 20,000 tickets to Blizzcon, so it was very crowded. I was expecting more third-party vendors/booths than there were. I'm not sure if Blizzard limits it, or if there just weren't any other companies interested.

I'd like to take a moment to express my admiration at the true creativity and originality of the 3,000 or so people who were wearing a Blizzcon shirt (not exaggerating). I'd estimate about 2/3rds of the attendees were wearing a t-shirt of some sort, most of them not funny or creative. Everyone was very, very pale. The lights in the building were set very low, and I concluded it must have been to make everyone feel more comfortable, as I'm sure it emulated their normal living environment.

Getting the registration badge on Thursday night was quite smooth; it took about an hour, despite about 10,000 people being in line in front of me. They treated it like an assembly line, even having the people checking IDs walking with you as you moved with the line to prevent things from slowing down. The line to get in the doors on Friday and Saturday morning was slower, mostly due to the fact that not enough rent-a-cops were handling it, checking every bag.

I did the Brady fishing quest, which involved waiting in 6 lines for about an hour total, followed by 1 line for an hour. It was a complete waste of time, as the random prize I got was 2 WoW comic books.

Unfortunately, I didn't meet a single other person from Undermine there. I asked around whenever I was waiting in a line, which was most of the time, but never found anyone. They had a Realm Meetup area, which had a 1 hour period set aside for each battlegroup, with tables labeled for each realm of that battlegroup. This would have worked great, except the one and only place they posted the schedule was right in front of the Realm Meetup area. Nightfall happened to be scheduled as the very first one on the first day, which started about 30 minutes after the opening ceremony finished. After the opening ceremony, I wandered around, and eventually made it over to the Realm Meetup area to discover to my dismay that Nightfall's hour was half over. There weren't very many people there at all, and not a single person at Undermine's table. I stuck around for a few minutes and then came back near the end of our hour, and there still wasn't anyone at our table. I think it was inexcusable that Blizzard did not include the Realm Meetup schedule on the overall schedule they gave us at registration. This was my biggest disappointment at Blizzcon.

I played the Warcraft: Cataclysm demo for about 20 minutes as a Worgen. Would have been more fun if there hadn't been 250 people in the starting area competing for kills on the starting quests, but at least I got to try out the racials. Their 8 second 70% sprint buff on a 3 minute CD will make them very popular for PVP, I think. Didn't get a chance to play the Goblin, because I didn't want to wait in line for another 90 minutes, but I'm guessing they'll be another popular PVP race, as they have a variety of activatable racial abilities.

There's lot of info out there about Cataclsym, so I don't need to repeat it all here. The new raids sound interesting. One of them will be an underwater zone. Some significant changes to stats on gear. Race changes will be introduced to the game after they add faction changes. Flying mounts everywhere outdoors in the game WOOHOO!

I played Diablo III as the new monk class for 20 minutes on solo mode only (multiplayer mode was available as well, but after the Worgen starting area, I decided against it). All of the character skill/spell customization was locked out, so it was hard to get a full feeling for what they've changed. From a pure combat standpoint, it seemed very similar to the previous games, with updated graphics. It was fun, however.

Watching the arena tournaments was more interesting that I was expecting. 3v3, a series of 5 matches between the same 2 teams. They have the option of switching characters between the matches. First to 3 wins moves up a tier. The standard combos did the best, but there were a few odd makeups that were pretty good.

At the Q&A, a woman said how she's tired of her guildies getting hacked and asked about what security they were going to add to the game, and if they would add email confirmation for merging an account with Battle.net. For those of you who don't know, it's common for hackers to merge your account with their Battle.net accounts, because it makes it harder for you to get control of your account back.

The guy who answered (I don't recall his name), said flat out that they're not planning on adding any additional security at all, except for the Authenticators. And they're not going to add email confirmation for Battle.net merges, because if you get hacked, it's probably because you have a keylogger on your computer, so email confirmation wouldn't make anything more secure, since your email account is compromised too.

This disgusts me. Instead of making their system more secure, they're just going to require everyone to buy an Authenticator, so they can make more money. And it's a fucking flat out lie that email confirmation would not help prevent some hacked Battle.net merges. I realized that they actually want some people to get hacked, so that everyone is more likely to merge their account on their own to prevent hackers from doing it, and more likely to buy an Authenticator, both of which make them more money.

The guild leveling and achievement system sounds interesting. They didn't give us many details, but essentially, the top 20 characters each day who play the most (i.e. dailies, pvp, dungeons, etc) will contribute towards leveling the guild. As the guild levels, it gains talent points that can be spent on things that help the whole guild, such as mass resurrect, mass summons, reduced cost of reagents/repairs, higher gold drops, etc. When your guild hits level 20, from that point on, you continue to earn more tangible things (which are guild-bound), such as patterns, potions, reagents, etc.

The cross server LFG system will cover each battlegroup, pulling people into the instance with an automatic summons. Being the leader of a PUG will grant rewards, which they implied would be similar to the guild leveling system.

The Mastery system, is just a revamp of the talent trees, by pulling out some of the "required" talents from each tree, and making them an automatic reward for buying into that tree a certain amount. In theory, this will let people spend more of their points on the talents that are useful in only very specific, rare situations.

The Path of the Titans is another method of customizing your character. Similar to glyphs or talents, they add more generic improves that anyone of any class/spec could use.

The Rated Battlegrounds system sounds quite disappointing over what I was hoping for. Basically, it's just a random battleground each week that playing in will earn you arena points (limited to prevent grinding). Losing does not lose you any rating. They made no mention whatsoever on whether you'll be matched with people of a similar rating, or if there's any restriction on rating to play.

Top overheard quote from some random person near me: "I have two DKs. One's blood, and one's frost. I haven't bothered getting either one past 70 yet."

Overall, I had fun and am glad I went. Like I said, I think they could have offered more third-party vendors/booths, and I'm wish I had meet people from our server, but it was worth going.

The best of the photos I took can be found at: http://s266.photobucket.com/albums/ii259/usibelli/Blizzcon09/