Gamescom day 2, raids and parties

Waking up, feeling like a living dead even when I had 10 hours of sleep. And arx kept reminding me about it, the whole morning. He says I need to be less weak and survive with less sleep,but I just love sleeping! We met with Manaflask people at 10 am and headed for Gamescom together by tram. The other guys had ate breakfast earlier and went to prepare for the live raid on Blizzard booth. I and arx got to slack and we went for a big breakfast/lunch at a nearby restaurant.

It was almost the time for the raid when we got back, and we were in a small hurry since we had agreed on meeting the Race to World First guys at the event to film some footage. When we made our way to the main entrance we realized we had made a huge mistake. There was around 1 hour queue to get inside. They had closed the gates and only let people in every 10 minutes. I later learned that as there had been some happenings in Germany where people had been trampled to death, they decided to close the gates completely for the rest of the day to make sure it wouldn't happen again. Needless tho say, even when they limited the amount of people who were able to get on, that the place was _crowded_. It was very slow to make it through all the corridors to hall 6. And very hot, we were already sweating like hell.

We finally made it to the Blizzard booth and met up with the video team and did the interview. The live raid was the next thing in schedule, and the guys started to make it to the Blizzard booth. The original plan was to have both For the Horde and Ensidia raiding for an hour on Saturday, but for some reason only Ensidia ended up raiding. Blizzard really made the event special from their part by giving out collector's editions of different wow expansions, t-shirts, one alliance fluffy gryphon (wanted that one so bad as well, shame on me), and miniature characters. After the giveaway was over, it was time for the raid. I and arx and rest of the Manaflask people were allowed to come to the stage, inside the security arena, and watch the raid from there. We watched the raid, took some pictures and saw some nice wow themed cosplays. I hear arx wants to reroll back to his warlock. We had met Meth, the awesome community member already on Friday, and went to meet him at ESL booth. We were lucky to get to the press area to unload the memory card of the camera, and upload some pictures to Facebook.

I also got the rare chance to interview the master interviewer, Nils. I asked him five questions about what's going on at the moment at Gamescom and wow overall.

 

Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Hello, my name is Nils and I'm 28 years old long time gamer and e-sports enthusiast. Currently I work for ESL and occasionally helping Paragon out with their website.

 

Tell us briefly what's going on at the moment, why are you here at Gamescom?

Just now I'm waiting for LoL semi finals to start. This saturday has been by far the busiest day of the event. It's been incredible to be part of this, seeing all the people gathering here for e-sports.

 

What has been your highlight of the event so far?

The first highlight of the event has been working for ESL. It's really interesting to be part of the whole show. The second highlight would be meeting arx and xeno finally. I've been wanting to meet them for some time already, and Gamescom offered the perfect opportunity.

 

What are you looking forward the most in World of Warcraft at the moment?

The thing I'm looking forward the most has to be the next expansion. I hope the Pandaren theme will not be just about flyffy pandas, but more like new huge unknown for the us players to explore forthe upcoming years.

 

Wanna send greetings to Paragon readers?

I want to encourage everyone to participate these kind of events. They are a great way to get into the e-sports scenes and experience the games, and of course meet other like minded people. Also, start reading the Paragon forums! Most of the questions people ask have already been answered somewhere.

 

After that we walked around a couple of halls in the event, chatted with different people and finally headed out to get some food before the ESL players party started. It was great seeing how Gamescom had spread all our Cologne. We saw some concerts downtown, and some Playstation and Nintendo trucks that had games on display for people to try. We went to eat at an Italian place, and after it went to the store to prepare for the destruction that would wait us the next morning. At the local shop some random guy came to me with a Mario Kart flag, started speaking in German and just put the flag into my hand. I completely panicked when I didn't understand what the guys was saying and couldn't refuse him fast enough before he was gone. I only know some basic every day words like "Panzerwagen" or "Kugelschreiber" or "Lederhose" which weren't that usable in that situation.

After getting our flags and food we headed for the party. We met up with For the Horde, Ensidia and Manaflask members as usual, as well as Nils and some other guys we've met at the event earlier. The rest is (awesome) history, of which I know very little as I was dancing pretty much the whole night. Some crazy moves in the night in Cologne, I warn you.