The Convention Fans Blog

Whoo hooo! BlizzCon, Blizzard Entertainment’s mega fan fest, started today. I scored a Virtual Ticket (yay, press) and I’ve been ‘attending’ BlizzCon this afternoon from the comfort of my living room.

It’s an interesting experience. For those of you who didn’t catch my previous articles about the Virtual Ticket, here’s a quick rundown. Conventions always have the video crews recording everything. With the Virtual Ticket to BlizzCon you get to watch the video of all the panels and events.

The downside is no dealer’s room or play tests, upside is no line for the bathroom.

Logging In to ‘Attend’

You login to your Virtual Ticket using your Battle.net account. They give you instructions in the ticket confirmation email.

When you login to the Live Stream there’s a view screen at the top with a list of all the panels. At the top is the Live Stream of what’s happening right now. Below that are what’s coming up and the archive.

The archive is great. When does that panel start? When I get back from picking my husband up from work. When I’m done playing with the dog.

Some Cool Stuff Announced About Blizzard’s Games

StarCraft II Multiplayer

The “StarCraft II Multiplayer” panel was running when I logged in Friday afternoon with my Virtual Ticket. They were going over the Terran battle units and the Shredder looks cool. It’s a little unit that puts out a radiation field. But they’ve negated the ball-of-death effect by making the Shredder deactivate when units from the same squad are near. They look pretty cool, and the video they showed was nice.

World of Warcraft

I play WoW, so this is the interesting part of BlizzCon for me. I watched the panel overview of the new Mists of Pandera expansion. Cool stuff:

• Companion Pets: they’re fun to collect, but now you’ll be able to train and battle them. They’re basically adding game play by combining the best features of Pokemon with WoW; it’s Wowimon! (I like to pretend I’m the first one to coin that)
• New Race: The Panderans are an anthropomorphic panda race with an Asian flavor. They love food and love beer, so they’re planning to do some fun stuff with the Cooking skill there. They’re a neutral class, so you choose your side at 10th level.
• New Class: The monk, which is another magic-user/warrior hybrid class. More than Panderans can be monks. Someone on the dev team said that if they couldn’t do Gnome Monks there just wasn’t a point in making the class.
• Character Moding: They went on at length about all the ways they are working to make it possible to tailor your specs more and so forth.

There’s a lot more nifty WoW stuff in just that one panel. You can see it for yourself by getting a Virtual Ticket. And then you too can attend BlizzCon from the comfort of your couch.