Blizzard Entertainment wanted to host their first fan convention. As I found out later from Rob Pardo, Vice President of Game Design (who says he reads The Safehouse all the time so, “Hi Rob!”) they at first thought of only having a convention focused only on World of Warcraft but he said if they were going to do it, “Let’s do it big”.

And did they ever.

I, like thousands of other fans of Blizzard’s games fans pre-purchased our BlizzCon tickets. I arrived at the Anaheim convention center around 9:30 AM, the doors would officially open at 10 AM.

I saw a long line formed outside the convention center. Oh well, it’s what I expected arriving this close to opening.

After I had parked and started to walk toward the line; however, I realized that the folk in it were already wearing badges around their necks. I still had to pick mine up. Someone in line verified for me that the badge pick up line was “that way”.

I walked around a corner and saw a longer line extending away from the convention center doors. I kept walking. I went around a curve of the building. I kept walking. I went around another corner of the building. I kept walking. Finally, the end of the line was in sight and there were more still more people filing in behind me.

The keynote address was to be at 10:30 AM, I didn’t think I was going to make it inside in time. I was right. I did get to talk to some folks in line with me. I even took some pictures. Pretty much folks in costume were our in-line entertainment, as they walked past to get in line everyone made them stop for a picture.

Apparently we were still the lucky ones though, these two guys wanted to buy tickets. 2 for $300.

By the time I got my badge, the other line to get in the venue was moving constantly so I didn’t have much more time to wait to get in, but I still missed the keynote address.

Entering the Convention Hall I was greeted with a scene akin to a mini E3. Banners and screens were hung from the ceiling. The banners indicated which part of the convention floor was for which game and the screens displayed looped demo films. Life size statues of Nova and a World of Warcraft dwarf were on display. I recognized them from E3. Underneath all this was the crowd and the lines. There were lines for playing the WoW expansion, lines for playing Starcraft: Ghost, lines to buy food, a very long line to pick up your goodie bag, and a nearly equally long line to buy stuff from the Blizzard booth. It made me think of Disneyland, which was just across the street. But like its “Happiest Place on Earth” neighbor, the mood at BlizzCon was generally of fun and excitement. I joined up with Woody (GU Comics) and his girlfriend Kyndra and we picked up our goodie bags without standing in line. How? Super powers.

I gotta give Blizzard credit on the goodie bag. 2 t-shirts, keychains, one of those gel bracelets -- these varied. I got a blue Starcraft one. I saw a brown WoW one in someone else’s bag. There was also a PvP book, a pack of playing cards and a souvenir booklet. Earlier I had also received a card good for my murloc pet and an invite to a Blizzard beta. This they had given me when I picked up my pass. Later on I ran into a guy who said his Australian guild mate has offered him $1200 for his murloc pet. He was seriously considering taking him up on the offer. I said for that money he could’ve flown in and attended himself! The guy said that the Australian was in a line of work which wouldn’t let him have much time off. I wondered what kind of work he did where he couldn’t take time off but had $1200 to spend on a murloc pet. I hear in Australia they tend not to let you out of the country if you get caught for robbing banks.

I hefted my own bag of loot. Not a bad haul for my $120 so far.

We checked the panel schedule. It seems that aside from the "Welcome Speech", "Careers in Gaming Panel" and the “Penny Arcade, PvP, GU Comics Panel”, most of the panels repeated themselves on Friday and Saturday. The demo films of the expansion and StarCraft Ghost were continuously swapped so you could catch those easily as well.

We wandered around the floor. At the Western Digital booth we got a coupon for a hard drive and a ball which lit up which flashed blue lights when you bounced it. Oooh shiny! Microsoft Games had a booth which was set up like a lounge with a movie playing and an assortment of free candy for the taking. At Nvidia’s booth you could play the WoW expansion, at least for a few minutes anyway. I took some shots which you can see in the The Safehouse Mugshot photo gallery. I got a good stretch of sit down play Saturday though, so more on that experience later.

During all this we ran into Scott Kurtz of PvP. He is one very large man. Inside, Penny Arcade had an actual booth selling t-shirts and posters. We talked to Jerry Holkins (aka Tycho) for a while. Mike Krahulik (Gabe) was sitting next to him but busy. We saw the “jousting” area (2 people try to knock each other off of a platform with large inflated boffers) in another section of the convention hall but didn’t try it. From afar I saw the climbing “wall” which was an inflatable pyramid type thing. We didn’t try that either. I dunno, but once you’ve been on real rock, an inflatable mountain with huge looking holds didn’t seem too appealing, hehe. We did look at the table top World of Warcraft game for a bit. The miniatures were in plastic but they had pretty nice detail in them. The game itself seemed akin to Risk.

After lunch I stopped in on a few panels. The format of most of the panels was to first show a PowerPoint-like presentation, give a bit of history on the panel topic, touch on future plans and end with a Q&A session. Between Friday and Saturday I attended the following panels: "Blizzard Art Design Panel", "World of Warcraft Character Class Panel", "World of Warcraft Battlegrounds Panel", "World of Warcraft Professions & Items Panel", "Starcraft Ghost Panel" and the "Penny Arcade, PvP, GU Comics Panel". I also got to speak to Jeff Kaplan, World of Warcraft Lead Designer (aka Tigole, former Safehouse Moderator!) and the previously mentioned Rob Pardo, as well as glean information from Press Room interviews and the official electronic press kit from Blizzard. Detailed information on things I learned will be presented a little bit later in this article.

Friday Night Contests

They had a dance alike, sound alike, and costume contest Friday night. And they also showed us the 5 winning player made movies. Prizes ranged from prize package containg a keyboard, mouse and a free year of WoW to laptops and a full Alienware tower. There was easily at least 2000 folks in attendance to view the contests and the Blizz folks utilized screens overhead so we in the back could see better. Of the dance alike winners one did the Troll dance and added flips and strength poses. The sound alike entrants included a lot of murloc and Warcraft peon impersonations. The final 5 winners included a Night Elf and gnome impersonation. I took various shots of the costume contest winners including a really well done murloc. There were 87 entrants for the costume contest!

General impressions of the Con

Well, for their first convention, Blizzard certainly pulled it off in my mind. Blizzard did a great job with presentation and eye candy – Oh, did I mention they had some paid models on hand? A male dwarf, 2 female night elves and 2 human casters (females) and one Nova from Starcraft. Find that gender ratio a little skewed? It's ok, as can be expected, there were many more males at the Con than females.

However, I felt the panels could’ve been a little more interactive. I liked being shown the evolution of some things like classes and the talent system but I wanted to know about future plans and to hear the concerns of the audience in attendance.

Some of the best presentations had many questions from the audience and a break from the bulleted lists. Starcraft showed us a model for the Protoss for instance which supposedly wasn’t going to be shown. Jeff in his portion of the Battleground panel, told us side notes as well and got a number of laughs. The webcomics panel however was almost non stop laughter and basically took questions from the audience for the whole hour. They covered ground such as covering gaming politics (Gabe and Tycho are not going to be arrested) to blackmail and gamer sex life. Of course these guys have already proven they are funny so it wasn’t surprising that it carried through in real life.

However, even though each Blizzard panel session may not have contained as much Q&A or feedback time as some would like, I noticed that panelists seemed quite willing to be cornered after their presentations and be asked questions individually. Brave souls. We’ll see if they keep that up next con ;)

In terms of other activities I think what was missing was more group activities for those not involved in the official gaming competitions, which I’m sure were fun, but were for the most part hard to watch as an observer especially with other sound and visual input going on around the stages. Something like EQ’s LiveQuest would’ve been fun for instance, though of course that might be problematic for the non WoW players in attendance. It would have helped fellow WoW server players find each other though. They had realm tables for that purpose but I think it was too loud for folks to really get a bonding situation going. At least one other person seemed to want to connect with fellow server mates, while I was playing the expansion Saturday I noticed someone in the chat channel trying to find others from their server to get together to form a raid. Unfortunately, the person didn’t seem successful at it.

Facts and Teases from Blizzard

The Expansion: The Burning Crusade

-         New level cap of  70

-         Socketed items, new way to upgrade your character

-         Blood Elves. Horde. Racial ability: Mana tap.

-         Increased poly counts and textures sizes to keep  competitive. Example: Ogre king

-         Story line is Outland

-         New mobs, the Naru, an angelic force rare but left there

-         Jewelcrafting

I mentioned earlier that I got to sit down to play the expansion for a decent stretch of time. Here’s what I did. Initially I went in and selected the premade level 60 undead rogue. I very quickly and haphazardly set up hotkeys and talents while folks kept challenging me to duels. Eventually I just wanted to see what I could do so stopped and accepted a few. I died to a Paladin and to another caster, I forgot what class, but I won a duel against, sadly, another rogue. I took some screenshots for us to analyze stats on the weapons I had.

After that I went to choose another character to play. Blood elf classes on my log in screen included: Mage, Priest, Warlock and Warrior. No rogue. I chose Warrior and logged in for some looking about. I noticed there was a hunter and rogue trainer in town but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything. All the trainers were located in Sunspire, lower level. The newbie hunting area was named EverSong Woods. I then decided I wanted to test the racial ability Mana Tap so went back and picked the Warlock which I played up to level 3 or 4.

I took screenshots of the Blood Elf dance male and female, the dance was more a “get down” sort of movement rather than the Moonwalk action of the Night Elves. Their cheer (not voiced at the time of play) included finger pointing in a “Hey, Hey!” attitude. When my male Blood elf jumped he would occasionally spin in midair.

More Blood Crusade info is sprinkled amongst the rest of my notes.

Patch 1.9

-      Ahn’ Qiraj Dungeon, Slightly Eygptian theme mixed with honeycombs.

-      Itemized character sets.

-      Animated items. Ex: moving eyeball axe

Class Panel

History of Classes

Classes that got cut: Necromancer, Death Knights. They wanted each class to be unique.

Mage intended to be a high damage class. Chains of Ice for crowd control.

Paladins (big boo from the crowd). Defensive in nature, intended to be easier to play.

Priest. In WoW they mde them more of a caster class then the armored cleric of old. They introduced racial spells, unholy line for the undead priests, with this class. Racial spells will be expanded in the expansion.

Shaman. (some one cried out "Nerf Shamans!")

Warriors. No crowd reaction.

Hunter. Pet class but they wanted to care about your pets, hence the feeding and loyalty.

Rogue. Combo point system was meant to be flexible.

Warlock. They wanted a variety of pets.

Druid only true hybrid class that they planned, at first dindt want to have at all because in WoW lore druids were male only.

Talent System – Tom Chilton, World of Warcraft Lead Designer

-      Started with a simple stat customization system, you put in points.

-      Talent system was from Diablo 2.

-      They wanted a limited pool of points. So for instance, they are unlikely to implement a system where you would gain points rather than exp if you were already at a level cap.

-      Talent statistics: on PvP servers level 60 players have unspent their points an average of 3.6 times. On PvE servers they’ve changed it an average of 2.3 times.

Future of Classes

• More class merchants for 60-70.
• Extended talent trees.
• Increased racial differentiation.
• Heroes?  They are actively working on capturing the spirit of the Warcraft 3 heroes and bringing them into the game.

Class Panel Q&A

Casters will get a spell penetration line to break through resistances.

Guy asked a question about the damage reduction for rogues, says he’s seen more of a 30% drop. Answer was that it depends on his weapons etc. “Rogues are still topping charts in damage” Tom said.

           They will be adding group blessing – the pally will just bless one member of a class and everyone in that class will get the blessing.

Battleground Panel - Jeff Kaplan, World of Warcraft Lead Designer

Blizz learned from each battleground. Warsong Gulch was the birth of the Zerg. They learned that something casual could turn hardcore.

Arathi Basin.

-         Warcraft 3 meets Battlefiled 1942

-         Lots of players but still accessible

-         Simple design

-         Wanted to spread people out

-         Clear points of interest – the Mill, etc.

-         Don’t just reward winners, award for holding   resources.

Side note: In the BG competition where the con attendee winners fought against the Dev team… Dev team lost by 1000, Jeff wasn’t on it though, so hopes to do better.

Instanced BG Future

-      Get Critical Mass on any BG, have at least one going

-      Better opponent matching by levels etc

-      Choose your BG based on gameplay not honor gain

-      BG should affect the outdoor world

-      Looking at cross server battlegrounds (the audience applauded) this would help soften the Alliance v Horde impbalance. Jeff confirmed this earlier when I talked to him, see my in real time post in the Safehouse forums (Biral owes me his soul, muhahaha!).

-      Queue improvements – Be able to enter queues for multiple Battlegrounds simultaneously (more audience applause)

-      Have a certain world event trigger a BG

BG Q&A

Arathi Basin example, have auto invite?

They plan on doing that.

Burning Crusade will have substantial revisions to how armor works

Outdoor world PvP?

May need to tune dishonorable kills first

Lore and Professions Panel

Eric Daws – Professions

Professions, stat, on average 20 million items are made each day in WoW.

Professions Future

Patch 1.9

Addressing concerns for fishing: macroing of fishing which led to reducing the values of this, no searching for a target.

Possible solution: going to be nodes of fish, qualitatively better stuff in nodes.

Enchanting: Enchanting Oils. Increase spell damage or man aver time regen. This will be an item so you can give it to friends, etc.

Nexus Crystals from disenchanting high level purples and very rarely, high blue.

Professions in the Expansion

Specializations – tailoring, alchemy, elixir potions maybe, not set in stone.

Jewelcrafting -  Rings, necklaces, crowns. Jewelcrafter only items.

Socketable Mystic gems which you can put into things to improve them.

Items - Scott Mercer

There is a system in place to create items and determine statpoints for them. Considerations include item quality, item level and item slot.

14 points = 1% crit hit

12 points = 1% dodge

The system promotes having different stats for an item.

They also have general guidelines such as no strength AND attack power on an item.

Side note, 3D Studio Max is used to design the graphics for the item. They start with concept sketches of course.

Items in Patch 1.9

More spell procs, can proc on heals, more flexible system.

Caster PvP is being looked at, spell penetration, see other notes.

200 handcrafted items for Ahn’Qiraj

Items in the Burning Crusade Expansion

1000s of them. See the gallery for the pictures.

Socketed items – new way to upgrade your character, will give you more control (guy in the crowd yelled, “I love you!”).

In the picture, careful to note because other sites have already caused confusion, On the left is Storm Rage, the Druid armor set, on the right is Dragon Stalker, the Tier 2 Hunterset.

Items and Professions Q&A

Cooking?

Cooking will get little tweaks in next patch, more focus on it later.

Enchanter drop down list menu?

Technical issues are preventing this but they may be able to get it in for the patch.

Any Alchemist only stuff?

They had one idea where the item would improve the effect of all potions taken across the board but it made servers crash. They are working on it.

Will all existing items be socketable?

No, limited to Burning Crusade drops, plus stuff in Azeroth.

Will socketed items be overridden by enchantments?

You will be able to have 3 slots: temporary changes, permanent changes, and then socket changes.

Will engineers be able to get a discount from using their own repair bot’s?

No, due to balance issues.

They are looking at repair costs though.

Even More Info

That’s about it from my notes.

Be sure to check out my pictures: www.thesafehouse.org/mugshots, some are taken of the presentation slides so you can glean more Expansion and Blizzard plan stuff there. I also have the official screenshots and concept art stuff hosted there.

Also, check out this thread for some questions and answers given practically in real time as I typed from from BlizzCon: http://www.thesafehouse.org/forums/showthread.php?t=20689

~ Fricka