I wasn’t looking forward to going to Blizzcon this year. It did, however, mark my 5th time to Blizzcon. My missed trip was during the ’08 con where ticket sales were horribly handled and I refused to support scalpers. Despite my negative view towards just attending Blizzcon (Friday alone, I missed 2 interesting seminars and The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary Symphony Concert) this year, I did have a good time, even if it meant wandering around the convention center aimlessly at least half of the time. I think part of why I was so negative was the $150 I “wasted” going to last year’s Blizzcon.

This will be a long post, but I’ve put a tl;dr list of highlights just after the jump.

Highlights (in no particular order):

• Mini Tyrael statue in goody bag
• Playing D3 demo 3 times
• Playing WoW demo 2 times
• Costume & Dance concert incl. Terran Adjutant
• Opening ceremony highlights: box art for D3, short clip for Heart of the Swarm, Mists of Pandaria
• Laughing so hard I was crying at the WoW Art panel
• Learning about voronoi at D3 cinematic panel
• Hearing live D3 chords and shorts at D3 sound panel
• Watching Blizzard artists draw and sculpt in real time (incl. Samwise)
• Lines for WoW demo were short/non-existent
• Lines for D3, SC2, and Blizzard DOTA were incredibly long
• Spending roughly the equivalent of the ticket price on merchandise

Really, a lot happened at Blizzcon that I will have to spend some time reading articles at Kotaku and Joystiq to see what I missed. I am glad that I went, despite having to spend $400+ for the entire trip. It is odd to think that the economy is not doing so well, yet there were 26,000 attendees including the 60,000 virtual subscribers. I saw many people at the Blizzcon store making purchases (such as the $130 Mega-Bloks Battlecruiser or Doomhammer), walking around wearing Blizzcon swag (including the $70 hoodie), saw people making JINX purchases and wearing their swag, and donating upwards of $2000 at the charity art auction, not to mention, trips to Medieval Times and Disneyland, eating both in the con and outside, staying at hotels, and making the flight out. Clearing gaming is the new investment!

Alright. This will be chronologically ordered – an event-by-event account of what my two days were like. A few caveats: I more of a Diablo fan than a Warcraft or Starcraft fan (I was glad they finally had a Diablo-theme this year), you can visit sites like Kotaku or Joystiq for complete write-ups of each event – I am not a game journalist, just a gamer who went to celebrate Blizzard’s games, and I tend to support the underdog (e.g., ArenaNet), so while I’m not particularly fond of Blizzard at the moment (esp. with their choice regarding D3), I will do my best to keep from being too negative. I will be making comparisons to last year’s Blizzcon so you can get a little perspective on why I wasn’t particularly happy to go this year at first.

Day 1
—
I went with a friend (A) from undergrad and had plans to meet up with another friend (B) from grad. I could have picked up the badges Thursday night and almost did, but laziness won out. Instead, I left in the wee hours of 7:20 to pick up A from his place and then headed up the busy freeways to the convention center (going against traffic = win). We got there around 8:00, picked up our badges and goody bags with minimal fuss and joined the huge mob around 8:30. Last year, it took over an hour to get in, resulting in missing about 30 mins of the opening ceremony. This year, they opened the doors an hour early (9:00). We rush in to do the Brady games quest. In previous years, Brady Games has given out really nice bookmarks as quest starters, stiff cardboard with rounded edges and beautiful concept art from WoW. This year was slightly different. Instead of the nice bookmarks, we got thin, flexible, rectangular pieces of cardboard with nice D3 art on it. Okay, I guess the official D3 strategy guide bookmarks haven’t actually been certified for sale yet. Mine was actually slightly bent, so I was a bit miffed. No worries, though.

About a 5 min wait took us to the front where we received a little plastic baggy with a map and two character cards inside, a Skeleton King and one of the D3 class cards. Great! I can use these as bookmarks in regular paperback books without risk of bending it nearly in half. Me and A spent the next 15 mins running around the convention center getting our maps signed by 4 other merchants: Mega Bloks, JINX, Cryptazoic, and Steelseries. Then, we spend more time in line back at Brady, receive a loot card and get … grey items. The last time I did this was in ’09 and we drew a token from a bag. This time, they gave us a loot card where we peeled off a tab to see what kind of loot we got. Gray meant you got a Horde or Alliance patch (woohoo /sarcasm) and other prizes were D3 posters, a deck of cards, WoW novels, mousepads, and I believe a Mega Bloks Battlecruiser. Horde patches for me and A.

It’s about 10am and on the way to the Opening Ceremony, we drop by the Antec booth to drop off our raffle ticket. Then, we decide to go find seats for the Opening Ceremony. We manage to find a couple of good seats with decent view of the monitors, including a middle one right in front of us. We later find out that it was much better to sit at the side than in the center because the side monitors displayed the stage while the middle monitors were sort of like slide shows displaying the name of who was talking (not the video feed) and advertising the games. I guess we had a decent view of the new cinematics.

So, while waiting for the opening ceremony to start, we’re eavesdropping on the three people behind us. A couple of them were Blizzard employees, or one was a Blizzard employee and his friend, and the third was a female friend of the second guy. The second guy ended up getting up for a while and the Blizzard employee was talking to the lady. Turns out, the Blizzard employee was an artist who did the big banner art at the Starcraft II demo (never caught his name) while the lady is an advertisement designer for Toyota. It was interesting to listen to artists, being mostly in the coding world lately. One topic they brought up was just being in the right environment, being surrounded by other creative people that push them to better themselves and their creativity. The Blizzard artist also mentioned that they got box lunches and a discount at the store (apparently the Battlecruiser for them was $91 and its normally $130; 30% discount!).

Opening Ceremonies (chronologically, this may be off, I’m just rattling off what I recall and in what order)
Eventually, Mike Morheim gets the opening ceremony underway. He announces the D3 box art and the collector’s edition just looks plain sweet. I would really only buy it just for the artbook and soundtrack, despite my stance on not wanting to support Blizzard any more than necessary. Then, he makes the further announcement that if you subscribe to WoW for a year, you get a digital version of D3 for free. WoW must really be losing subscribers. We are treated with a new pre-rendered, in-game cinematic. Unfortunately, the acoustics in Hall A are horrible and I couldn’t understand what the demon Azmodan was saying. So, the effect of the story of the cinematic was lost on me, but I definitely appreciated the quality. It clearly had the dark, gritty feel of the Diablo series that the game itself lacks.

Then, he hands off the mic to Chris Metzen, who goes into Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm. We are treated with a short cinematic concerning Kerrigan’s quest for vengeance against Arcturus. I played through about half of SCI before SCII was released and while I own a copy of SCII, I have yet to start it, much less finish SCI. I am familiar with the general storyline, at least. Again, the quality of the cinematics is one of the best I’ve seen and it’s like a guilty pleasure watching these trailers. The energy of the crowd (which has shifted from WoW to SC2 and D3) definitely contributed to the atmosphere and excitement of that room.

Finally, WoW is addressed. Mists of Pandaria, the new Panda-based class is released along with a Monk class. I was actually more interested in wanting to play this (but not entirely, it was more like I could do without playing it) mainly because of the Asian influence, which isn’t present in many games. Guild Wars Factions is what really got me into Guild Wars (along with the Kunnavang minipet), but I don’t think MoP will get me playing WoW again. The energy was also considerably lower. Cheers were much more muted compared to D3 and SCII. The guy next to me (who asked me watch his bag twice during the ceremony as he ran off to the bathroom – too much coffee, I guess) was yelling, “No pandas!” before the video was actually shown.

It was an abrupt transition afterwards with “Welcome to Blizzcon!” (or something along those lines) signifying that the ceremony was over.

Sound Panel and Lunch
The Opening Ceremony didn’t even last the full hour. Kind of sad. Me and A made our way to the Panel Stage to listen to the Sound Panel, focused on D3. Again, the quality of the acoustics in Hall D was horrible. I really wanted to enjoy the guy playing the bit of music from D3, but I think they needed to attenuate the sound so it wasn’t up in the hideous noise range. There was a good group of people up there from the sound department. We got to watch short videos of the sound effects engineers burning themselves trying to light things on fire as well as listen to chords, how the guitar was re-tuned to create that eerie D3 music. Again, like WoW and SC2, D3 recorded music with a live orchestra in a concert hall. I was glad to hear that they tried to keep D3 in its own sound sphere. WoW and SC2 music sound a little too much alike with the chorals and I was afraid they wanted to carry that over into D3. Also kinda cool was seeing that they were using actual voice actors instead of having Chris Metzen do all the voice work. I believe they mentioned there were 28,000 lines compared to the 3,000 in WoW or SC2. I don’t quite remember the number, but it was significantly higher than WoW or SC2. That’s a lot of voice acting! They also showed a clip of the voice actor for Deckard Cain. Great.

After the panel, I saw that B had called me earlier and we arranged to meet up for lunch. While B was standing line for the store, me and A went to the car to drop off our goody bags. On the way out, we see someone cosplaying as the Terran Adjutant. It was one of the best costumes I had seen. Since she had so much makeup on, she had to get some help from her friend to drink water and eat lunch. It was kinda cute. I just felt sorry she had to be dressed up in that for the next 8 hours (hope she didn’t have to use the restroom). We then headed to Tiffy’s, a local diner and homemade ice cream shop that seems to be the “regular restaurant” for me to go to each year. The food is good, but slightly more expensive than even con food. The atmosphere is nice and as usual, filled with con-goers.

Demos
After spending about an hour and a half a lunch, we return to the convention center trying to avoid getting caught in the cosplay pictures. Compared to previous years, I can already see the cosplay crowd growing with people finding ideal scenes for their shots. They took up the space just outside the doors to the halls as well as outside where the line wraps around the building.

Our first demo was the D3 demo. I don’t remember playing the monk class at previous cons, so that is my first choice. Unlike previous demos I’ve played, this one actually has a huge message that says your time has expired. Of course, we all ignore it so we can keep playing until they kicked us out. The second demo we played was the MoP demo. A didn’t really want to play it and B had already played it but was trying for the poster. I, of course, start messing around, curious to see if the dance emote was coded yet (it wasn’t). The quests are same-ol’, same-ol’. I actually found it slightly amusing that there was a nod to Cantha in the very first quest: pick up equipment from the chest and put it on. The rest of the demo was spent getting familiar with Pandaria building interiors and props. Very Chinese.

I should put in a quick mention here that although MoP wasn’t received very well (compared to when WoW was still peaking), the work that the art and sound designers put into it really shows off. Gameplay-wise, it is same-ol’, same-ol’, and not even a new class sparked my interest. But, the world is something I explore first and I was actually surprised that they had so much of it available for players to check out. It wasn’t a strict 20 minute demo and you’re done, but 20 minutes wasn’t enough to get through it all.

One amusing point is that the line for MoP was considerably shorter than D3 and SC2 and continued to stay that way until the end of the con. Also amusing is the demo area was larger (at least on the map) than the other two franchises. A last amusing point is the trash talk that went on. The first was started by A (but I imagine it went on even before we even stood in line), who mentioned, “I can’t believe I stood in line for this.” That was then followed by more negative remarks. There was also a Silly Achievement (TM) for the monk class that you get when you use the roll ability you learn at level 2 100 times.

Costume & Dance Contest
Last year, I missed out on this. I was told there was live music (which I sort of saw on someone’s recorded stream) and a guy who broke his leg (which I did see on the recorded stream). Of course, he was the topic of amusement this year with silly (lame) jokes on wishing contestants to break a leg, but that doesn’t seem like a good omen when it actually happens. We were treated to 3rd place online contest winners, including a really nice D3 art piece and amusing WoW and SCII machinima. We also listened to about 5sec of the 3rd place song. Then, there was the costume contest. B was joking that they should turn it into a drinking game where every time someone came out in a Tyrande or Sylvannas costume, you had to take a shot because there were so many. While the judging was taking place, we were treated to 2nd place online contest winners, including a WoW art piece (which I noticed was on an Antec case at their booth) and an okay WoW machinima and a really bad SC2 machinima (not sure how it won over the 3rd place, really). It was amusing because the SC2 movie was so slow, although the twist was sort of cliche, it was kind of cute, that someone shouted it sucked and a few people were cheering. We got a good laugh out of that. Another 5 sec clip of original fan music. They announced the winners and moved on to the dance contest. I estimated 5 groups of 10 were going to go, but I think it was more like 3 groups of 10 individuals and 1 group performance. Same Ninja group from last year and they were decent, but I guess I have high standards after UCI’s Kaba Modern on America’s Best Dance Crew. Finally, 1st place winners for the online contests during the dance judging. Really nice D3 art, very amusing SC2 and WoW machinima (no let downs there), and what sounded like an interesting song, but we only heard 5sec of it. Really, they should fix that music part. Finally, they announce the dance winners and we’re free to go.

Winding Down
I’m not a huge eSports fan, so the GSL finals didn’t particularly resonate with me. B wanted to stick around for that, but he said he got a headache half way through the contests and A has had a headache since morning. Instead, we head out to the Frostmourne podium. B wanted a picture with it, so I snapped a couple and we parted ways. Me and A roamed the booths a little bit more, trying to grab some freebies they were tossing about not having much luck.

Then, we went to go play the D3 demo again. This time, I played the witch doctor and got a kick out of it. A was getting tired of playing the same quests over and over again, though, so we mozy over to the store which literally has no line. I proceed to spend stupid amounts of money on items I don’t need, but kind of wanted (Key Art poster, D3 poster, Diablo 15 Year Anniversary soundtrack, 20th anniversary Blizzard hoodie, and a Horde blanket (gift)). I was surprised and miffed to find that the 2 D3 posters listed on the pre-sale weren’t available at the actual store. What is up with that? I hope they have it at the post-con sale. Not like I need more posters… The Blizzard staffer saw me touching the Horde/Alliance blanket and commented, “Feels nice huh? Now imagine the hundreds of other people touching that.” Hahaha, he was such a cool guy. I’m not sure how A mentions the discount we heard from the guy behind us, but the staffer tells us that there isn’t a discount for Blizzard employees. Who’s telling the truth?

We made a last round of the booths, trying out our keys at Steelseries, which once again didn’t open the chest, and picking up some stickers from the nVidia booth. A asked what we were supposed to do with them since they had numbers similar to the Find Your Match game they have every year and the guy said something like, “You stick it on things. It increases the graphics quality!” We got a good laugh.

Then, we head home around 10, exhausted.

Day 2
—
Since we didn’t have to pick up our badges and given the previous day’s early entrance, we aimed to arrive around 9am to try our luck with the Brady quest. Unfortunately, after more running around and even longer lines now that more people have found the quest, we still got WoW patches. Sigh. I suppose a tactic, since they don’t mark off the quest markers any more, is to just jump back in line to get another map because the quest hubs will mark off multiple maps per person. Someone had 7 maps they turned in at once. Would suck if he got all patches, and considering my luck, that’s probably what would have happened if I did that.

Live Raid
We snag seats for the live raid at 10:00. The atmosphere, like the opening ceremony, is something you can’t experience through a stream. People are charged up and excited to watch two guilds go head to head. Vodka (Alliance) pulls ahead with the first two boss kills while Blood Legion (Horde) continues to work on their first. Then they get neck and neck. Ultimately it’s a wipe on Ragnaros by Vodka that lets Blood Legion claim a flawless victory. Meanwhile, Vodka is plagued by Hogger as they attempted to give Ragnaros a second try. A and B are inspired to play WoW again. A and B both think raiding is sociable, A mainly because he can brag about being top DPS (Warlock) while B has yet to hit the level cap. I agree with the social part, but I also remember the drama and stress and long nights and decide while from a retrospective, romantic standpoint it was fun, practically it was shaving time off my life.

WoW Art Panel
On the way to the WoW Art Panel, we stood between the nVidia booth and the Asus booth. Both were tossing out giveaways. We’re always close to the drop spots, but never quite in the right position. I was kind of miffed yesterday at one of the drops, a guy next to me got 2 things and stuffed it in his pocket without caring what they were. I was standing next to him glaring daggers, of course. Being short, these things are never in my favor. However, being left-handed has its advantages. A was standing to my left where a drop finally went and while he and four other guys were fumbling, I snatched it from them. Left-handed. Poor A got hit on the head a few times during that skirmish, though. I got a Asus wristband, yay! (The guy from the previous day got 2 of them. Lucky.)

The WoW Art Panel had me laughing to the point of tears. But that happened at the end. The panel consisted of mostly managerial-types/leads from all parts of the art department. It was very cool to learn about the new proprietary technologies they’ve developed for in-house use. Blizzard truly has some of the brightest working for them. They were also a little proud with their boasting and having the best artists in the industry. I’m afraid I have to disagree. Daniel Dociu’s artwork is something else entirely. Anyway, having missed the MoP panel yesterday, I learned that Pandaria takes place on a turtle. My experience with beta yesterday had put Pandaria in Firelands (if you zoomed out), amusingly enough. The depth texturing to fill in snow in the crevices was really interesting technology and quite intuitive. We also saw a little bit of how they brainstormed the new race, including story telling by one of the artists that, again, I couldn’t quite catch entirely because the acoustics suck. I also learned that the dungeon art team has wine and cheese. Tasty.

What had me in tears at the art panel was the props director. He started off a little timid, but turned out to be a very strong and engaging speaker. His presentation stood out in my mind the most because it was so engaging. He paralleled 8 year-olds with the designers he works with (I don’t remember which ones) and had a really smooth transition into what had us all laughing. They created a Pandarian logogram (think Chinese characters). He then proceeded to use a banner as an example of what a designer wrote and it was pretty much a mash of random words put together. That’s where the 8-year old part comes in.

The designer aspect comes in when they get bored, will engage their creativity by putting props together in various fashions (the 5 slides between Designer/8-year olds and animated props title slides). It could have been a in-house contest designed specifically for the talk, but it was amusing nonetheless. One was a shrine involving a banana and I think a gourd or squash, another was a crane statue made entirely from the farming props, and one other one I remember was a train made with a bathtub prop. The last few minutes of this panel is worth watching just for the laughs. (Especially when he adds eyes to a few of the props and turns it into an art piece.)

Lunch break
I was amused to find that they had a SC2 mod panel given they outraged the WoW mod community a few years back. I wasn’t interested, however, and we met up with B to grab some food. Cheesecake Factory was our destination and I was very surprised to find it was half empty. The walk took a good 20 minutes, lunch another hour, then the walk back. I wanted to go to the SCII art panel because I am a fan of art, but by the time we got there, they were at the Q&A section. Instead, I watch (and half force A and B, who had previously left to try to play Blizzard DOTA and came back because the line was too long, to watch) the artist stage where two of the artists were working on D3 art and I wasn’t sure what the sculptor was working on (some sword).

D3 Cinematic Panel
Eventually, we grab seats for the D3 cinematic panel. Again, there’s a group of people from the cinematics team, I think mostly leads. I learned a lot from this panel, mostly how Blizzard cinematics prefer to do things and a little bit of technology. I was surprised at the amount of detail they spent in just technical things, like getting the lighting on materials just right and simulating different materials and textures to make sure it feels right. They also don’t use motion capture. They take high res photos and video recordings which they then animate themselves. I also learned about voronoi, a technique to animate a shattering rock wall.

I was really impressed with the panels I attended this year. The quality was not too technical that the uneducated couldn’t understand, but it was advanced enough that I learned stuff from it and wanted to stick around to hear more. Last year, the few panels I attended were more basic, catering mainly to the uneducated crowd who were sort of interested, but didn’t want to really grasp the underlying stuff underneath. The way lighting was explained, for example, was really good. It wasn’t broken down into the many layers I’m sure the cinematic had, but four main layers to get the concept across. Rigging, as well, was defined for the uninitiated and animation samples of how it worked but slow enough for those unfamiliar with rigging to get the general idea of what was going on. The questions people asked were also sort of technical (well, the ones I stuck around for, anyway). I recall one person asking about compression of audio files at the sound panel.

Artist Stage
After the panel, B left to go watch the invitational finals. I wanted to watch Samwise draw (unfortunately the cinematic panel and the artist stage overlapped a bit, so I got to watch the last half of it) and was treated with digital painting of SC2, a traditional drawing of WoW, and a 3D sculpt of D3. A suffered, but he didn’t have anything he really wanted to do and standing in line to play demos wasn’t really an option because playing the same thing over and over gets boring.

Closing Ceremony
We wandered around trying to find more freebies before finding seats for the closing ceremony. Level 90 ETC (TAFKA 80 ETC) played for about an hour. I had sufficient ringing in my ears by the end. I’m sort of glad they used a in-game footage/machinima because it made it more bearable to watch. They also invited a real metal singer to guest-sing one of their songs. I didn’t really notice a difference, but I think that was about when I had to run to the restroom. The only thing I liked was the riffs for their D3 song, which, of course, didn’t last very long. Again, I was more irritated by the lack of attenuation on the guitar that it felt like someone was filing my ear drums with a nail file or sandpaper.

When they finally left and before Foo Fighters came on, me and A were discussing the Antec raffle that was going on at 20:00. We stayed for the first song and a half of Foo Fighters before leaving to go to the raffle. Last time I’ll say this, acoustics sucked. We couldn’t understand what they were saying. Apparently a few other people felt this way. Apparently a great many other attendees didn’t find the concert to be all that exciting because the rest of the convention was packed. Razer was doing their last giveaways. Antec was packed. Some lucky soul got a full system with a custom Tyrael painted case. I’m not sure what 2nd and 3rd prizes were. Sound Blaster also did their last giveaways. A lot of the booths had scheduled their final giveaways at 20:00. Someone speculated it was crowd control because if you left the concert, supposedly you could not re-enter.

Ending Blizzcon
A was pretty much following me around at this point. I didn’t want to leave early (after last year) and wanted to get the extra $75 I spent this year (tickets were originally $100 and there’s no reason for the increase, esp. with the economy the way it is, just my stance). So, I made a last circuit of the booths we always walked past but never stopped to look at. This year was heavily D3 themed and unless I’m dragged back to Blizzcon, this was a good one to end personal visits to.

We made one last round of the demos. WoW literally had no line and we ended up playing for a while because no one wanted to play it! I found this as a marker that WoW is dead if attendees were abandoning it for D3 (which already has beta out for some players) and SC2. Instead of trying for an exclusive poster, I explored the Wandering Isle, aka, turtle island. I missed the western side, but saw a lot of the props mentioned at the art panel and the beautiful models and scenery. It could have been the demo machines’ hardware (which notoriously kept locking up at all the demos), but it definitely looked like a step up from the graphics I’m used to. I was very amused by the model of the yak. It was adorable. It was difficult to remember that even if I took screenshots, I couldn’t take them home.

The concert ended while we were in line for D3, our last activity for the night. They were giving away a signed poster, but I was very tired to bother cheering. I never get those giveaways anyway. The Asus wristband was a fluke and something likely to not happen again. The group of 4 we were in for the demo ended up with the other pair playing individually and me and A playing together. A got sidetracked with exploring and I was rushing to see how much more content I could see. Eventually he caught on and since we had played twice before, we knew roughly the sequence of the starting quests (which, much to my dismay, is very much like WoW: kill these things, get a reward and another quest). We got further than we did before, but our time expired. A said the two guys next to him got up but they weren’t being kicked out because the staffer behind him had said, “Oh, done already? Did you enjoy it?” Darn!

We left the convention center. Traffic was heavy, as expected for people leaving Blizzcon and Disneyland. It was 22:00 and I was starving. A was hungry as well, but didn’t want to eat to so late because of the diet he’s on. However, we ended up going to Ihop. I was in the mood for pancakes, something substantial. The tricky part was eating enough so I wasn’t starving, but not too much that I was falling asleep at the wheel. We each ended up downing four mugs of coffee. I got decaf because I had to drive back up in the morning, but unfortunately while I had enough to keep me awake to get home, I had too much that I couldn’t sleep.

An exhausting, but fun two days.

Final Thoughts
—
I had a lot of fun this year. However, like the previous cons, just about everything that can be done (e.g., demos, visiting booths), can be done in one day. Panels are hit and miss. Sometimes they’re all scheduled on one day, sometimes they’re spread over both. Sometimes they’re scheduled at inconvenient times, like for lunch. I found the quality of the panels to be much better this year than last year. I think it would have been more enjoyable with a group of people to hang out with. Not necessarily for the entire con visit, but to meet up for Live Raid, a demo, or lunch.

I somehow spend a lot of money at the store, which is good for Blizzard, but bad for my pocket. I was also not impressed with the goody bag items. Mike Morheim mentioned that they try to get better each year. The Noobz figurine from ’09, I could have done without. Dethwing Hatchling is cute, but still boxed up. So will my Mini Tyrael be. Figurines, I’m sure, are a hit with certain people, but I could always use practical things (and not more authenticators) like hand sanitizers or Sinnamints, which I missed out on in ’08 and supposedly they’re very tasty.

’10 was supposed to be my last Blizzcon. I am glad that A decided to see if he could get tickets this year (according to the survey he filled out in my name, he said the most enjoyable part was seeing if he could to the front of the ticket queue or not) as I’ve waited many years for Diablo to shine in the spotlight. I missed ’08 when they announced D3 at WWI so I don’t know if that was D3-themed because WoW was still going strong. I am actually on the fence on whether I want to go again in the future or just stick with the streams. If they announce what will be in the goody bags early as well as who’s playing for the closing concerts (really, I’m not a big Foo Fighter, Tenacious D, or Ozzy fan), those would help in my decision to try to return.

Also, it’s a great stress reliever because now I can truly say that I’m exhausted!