Blizzcon!

I had the pleasure of going to Blizzcon this past weekend. My friend Carl was an awesome host and turned the occasion into a birthday present for me. My wife was awesome to take care of the boys while I got away for three whole days.

Carl is a brilliant game designer (and physicist) that I've known since our Red Storm days. We had lots of fun discussions about the future of WoW. Hopefully, I'll be able to post about that later.

Here's what I did:

• flew in on thursday morning
  
• after a slight snafu with my badge (they had my name spelled wrong), got into the show
  
• ate an overpriced mini-pizza
  
• watched a pvp match
• attended the class panel
• wandered around a bit
  
• went back to the hotel and played our level 35 dwarves
• woke carl up way too early to play the dwarves a little more
• went back to Blizzcon
• attended the pvp panel while Carl played Diablo 3
  
• stood in line for 1.5 hours, bought some t-shirts and elf ears
• took pictures
  
• attended the q&a session
  
• went to carl's home and introduced him and his wife to AV
• dwarfed a bit more in Dustwallow
  
• went for a walk
• flew back after a slight freakout at the LA traffic
  

I should relate my point of view. I play regularly on 3 different servers. I have 2 70's (decently-geared mage and poorly geared shaman) on a pvp server in a guild that started as friends and merged a couple of times so that we now have 150 members. I have a 60 rogue that I play in AV. I have a 56 warlock that I group with friends (Carl and his wife and their two friends) and a 39 hunter that I duo with Carl. I have a 59 hunter just for BGing on a server that had some friends who no longer play there.

As a stay-at-home father of 2 with a wife who works way too much, my playtime is unpredictable. If I wake up early, I can play for a bit before the baby wakes up. It might be 10 minutes, or it might be an hour. I might get to play while the baby naps, but that varies from day to day. I can usually count on being able to play after the kids are in bed, if I'm not too exhausted. When things aren't too crazy at the wife's office, she takes care of the kids one night a week so that I can group with my guildies. Some are on the east coast, so grouping with them means starting well before the kids are abed.

Stuff I learned at Blizzcon:

• Hybrids are gettin' a lot of love in this expansion. They'll apparently be doing as much DPS as my puritan mage, and can swap to healing whenever they like. They can do crowd control, and raid food can come from some cooking thing. Why bring a mage? Why roll a mage? I plan to level my mage, partly because I can't wait to tailor a flying carpet, but I'm thinking that my shaman will have a lot more utility.
• Apparently, the epic tailored items from BC were too good, and WOTLK will not have such stuff. That bums me out -- as a casual player, I was able to craft gear that kept me useful in Kara alongside people who got to raid a lot more than me. I didn't need a lot of drops there, but was in it to hang out with my friends. On the bright side, it sounds like we will be able to get gear that's useful in both PVP and PVE by doing PVP. I can make PVP fit my schedule.
• BGs may be much more fun. There's a buff that is applied when your side has fewer players. It scales your damage and reduces how much you take and is updated whenever the number of players changes. I've been in a lot of games that would have been more fun with this. I'm actually looking forward to being outnumbered so I can make some massive crits.
  
• Lake Wintergrasp is going to be really cool. I'm afraid I won't get to play in it though. It's apparently timed, running 30-40 minutes, with a 2.5 hour cooldown. I'd love to try it, but what are the odds that I will hit that window? If I do manage to get in there, will I be able to get into the associated instance too? My play-time is pretty constrained. We'll see how this plays out, but I'm concerned.
• Watching the arena competition was completely lame. There was no way to tell what was going on. They tried to present it like it was a wrestling match or something, but the tools were completely useless. They showed it from a player's perspective and switched often, making it utterly impossible for me to tell what was happening. The commentator seemed to be able to talk about what was going on, but didn't really help much. It's possible that going to a top down or 3/4 view that's not tied to an individual player, and having some graphical elements to clear up who's damaging or healing who (like faux spell effects linking combatants) could do it.
  
• What I really want to see for arena matches is a tool that lets you replay a match from any viewpoint, with pausing, rewinding, and slow motion. Unlike a wrestling match, you can completely capture the events of a game -- it's all in nicely compressed packets. Please, Blizzard, make something where you can log a match and replay it. It could be out of game, maybe accessible through the armory or a separate app. You could even sell access to important matches.
  

Overall, it was a fun experience. I didn't get to see many of the podcasters I'd hoped to, but did see Justin (or was it Jeremy?) from Outlandish ask a question in the Q&A.

I'm psyched about what Blizzard is doing in the expansion. I was happy to see that Ghostcrawler is an intelligent, well-spoken guy (although not a hot intelligent, well-spoken gal, as was rumored on the forums). Most of the WoW team was likewise intelligent and forthright. I feel like our game is in good hands.