Blizzcon 2010 Journal

Ilonie:

FIRST DAY: THE JOURNEY

On Wednesday morning I woke up around 6 am and started my day with a cup of coffee. I spent a while making sure I didn’t miss anything - for the fourth time. I traveled to Turku airport an hour before flight, and drank another coffee.

(Was pretty nervous and tired). The flight from Turku to Helsinki took around 30 minutes and I and Lazei were supposed to land on Helsinki-Vantaa Airport around the same time. When we got to Helsinki Lazei told me that there was some kind of confusion with the tickets. Luckily we had around 5 hours before the flight to New York took off, so we had time to get the ticket fixed. We decided to eat something at the airport, and that was a big mistake. We ordered pizzas which were like the most expensive and overall the worst pizzas we’ve ever had. After we had eaten we went to the area next to the boarding gate, and took a nap while waiting for the flight.

 

Lazei and the awesome chair

 

The second flight was long, around 8 hours of watching movies or sleeping... and the audio in my movieplayer was broken somehow; the music was alright but speech had some weird noise in it, and I didn't really want to try to read the whole movie from lips. I got some hours of sleep and we landed safely to JFK airport in New York. This time we didn’t have that much spare time there, only 3 hours. I went to buy something from the airport shop, so that when I get old, I can remember being in the big city New York.

 

I wondered around 30 minutes what to buy, and then I chose a little cup. After a few hours we took off from New York and I stole Lazei's seat in the plane and got the window seat. It was around 6 pm and the city below us was all dark and we saw all the city lights there, it was beautiful. The flight took around 6 hours and this time audio worked. I watched Toy Story 3, but it wasn't really my favorite movie; I fell asleep after an hour from the start.

 

We arrived to LAX airport in Los Angeles and went to get my luggage. After finding it we went to catch our shuttle to the hotel. Getting to the hotel took a bit longer than anticipated, around 40 minutes. We checked in to hotel Marriot and I and Lazei got our own separate rooms (YEY!). First day was longer than I had imagined, from home to hotel Marriot took 28 hours! So after the check in we went straight to sleep.

 

 

SECOND DAY: BLIZZARD HEADQUARTERS

 

I woke up a bit earlier than Lazei and went outside to see how the hotel looks in daylight. It was as awesome as I had imagined it would be.

 

 

 

 

 

After I spotted Lazei was awake we went to get some breakfast. After eating we went to the lobby to wait for the guys from Blizzard to pick us up for the tour in Blizzard HQ. Around 10 minutes later Marc Olbertz came and we started our journey. In the center of Blizzard HQ I saw the most awesome statue ever. I just had to take a picture standing next to it.

 

 

Me and the most awesome statue in the world.

 

Inside we subscribed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and had some time to take pictures from the gallery. We saw some awesome art from Blizzard’s games.

 

 

 

 

We went to cafeteria building and had some time to talk with developers and. We had a good conversation about Lich King, paladins etc with Ion and some dude from tankspot. We spotted Ghostcrawler, who was much more awesome than I had imagined. After an hour of talking it was our turn to go for a tour around the Blizz HQ. Because of the NDA we can't really tell the most awesome things we saw there, but the second most awesome thing was the really nice art we saw there, and luckily we can talk about that. John (the man who was guiding us) didn't give a us permission to take pictures from 'em tho :'<.

 

The tour took around 45 minutes and after that we went to the auditorium to watch some Diablo 3 game play and a people talking about that Blizzard has planned for the future; fansites etc. After that we went back outside and took a group photo with everyone who was there (around 80 people) and then we had a dinner.

 

We went back to the hotel and walked to Hawaiian restaurant and got a really good dinner. We were sitting there with Marc, Tobias and one fansite dude from Italy. After we had eaten, Marc told us that we’ll get a surprise after we go outside.  They gave us Blizzcon 2010 art paintings with Weis’ autograph! After all the awesomeness we walked back to the hotel, left the paintings (to keep them safe) and left to get our Blizzcon passes.

 

After the long day we went back to our hotel and slept a good night waiting the next morning and the opening of Blizzcon 2010.

 

 

 

FRIDAY: FIRST DAY OF BLIZZCON

 

With our progamer badges we were able to use the early access entrance, and got in before the main crowd. We used that advantage to get nice seats for the opening ceremony.

 

 

 

We would be playing our live raid on the main stage in a few hours. The spectator area had seats for 12 000 people and I realized that it would suck if people wouldn’t be interested to see the raid and the room would be half empty. On the other hand it would be really scary if the place would be packed full.

 

After the opening ceremony we went to see what is going on elsewhere. Ended up at the progaming area where Tasteless and Day[9] were greeting people, so of course nerds like us wanted to be in a picture with them.

 

 

Ilo and Day9

 

 

Lazei and Tasteless 

 

Live raid time! Before the live raid we met some devs backstage.

 

 Daelo

 

The live raid itself started with some problems. The realmlist for the clients and some other configs were wrong so we couldn't log in beforehand to setup our clients. I finally got in just minutes before the event would start and started to setup the keybinds and everything. We were playing on ASUS laptops and because of being customed to normal keyboard I kept pressing the windows key instead of ALT. If you saw the live raid you probably saw Windows Media Player and other windows programs more than a few times :)

 

After getting used to the keyboard layout everything went a bit better. I completely zoned out (with the help of amazing headsets they had) and could only hear the cheers from the crowd. I had no idea what the devs were talking about and just concentrated on raiding. As probably everyone knows, the raid was a special event on the Beta realm. We were given items that phased us out from the normal realm. That of course tempted spammers to come out, and because I hadn't had the time to config my client properly, I still had whispers and general chat visible.

 

The crowd was huge. There were seats for 12 000 people and it was almost full. A huge thank you to everyone who was there in person (and everyone who watched the stream). I hope you liked it as much as we did!

 

Fighting 4 bosses at the same time is pretty hard to say the least :)... We quickly tried to identify the most dangerous abilities and quickly deal with the hardest boss first.

 

We had met some people from Blood Legion before the raid, and agreed to meet them again after we were done with the raid. While talking with the devs backstage we met with Nodozz from Blood Legion. There was a documentary crew following the Blood Legion guys everywhere. The documentary is about Blood Legion trying to get world first, so they wanted to interview us. The interview was pretty good. The guy asking questions was really friendly and actually knew what he was talking about which isn't too usual. We ended up having a nice chat with the Legion guys afterwards about random stuff.

 

 

 The Blood Legion.

 

Boxer vs FruitDealer showmatch was starting at the RTS tournament stage. Being big SC2 fans we obviously made our way there.

 

                                                                                      

Boxer

 

FruitDealer 

 

FruitDealer destroyed Boxer 2-0 but the matches were nice. The venue was closing for the day and our plans were to meet Premonition guys over dinner.

 

 

Paranition?! 

 

There are some better pictures on Premonition's Blizzcon thread at http://premoguild.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6507

 

Lazei:

SATURDAY: SC2 AND SOME COSPLAYS

 

Once again, with the power of progaming badges, we went in before the venue was opened for everyone, and secured front row seats at the RTS tournament stage to watch some SC2! I spent pretty much the whole day just watching the matches. Ilo was going around convention center spotting people with nice costumes. In the goodiebags there was a special key to a box which had the chance to contain some phat loot (if the key fitted). Sadly we had gotten the goodiebags and Ilo ended up picking a key that didn't open the lock :<. He also found a really cute fangirl named Elise, and took few photos with her, and after that with Jojo the hot Banshee Queen Sylvanas.

 

 

Ilo and Jojo the Banshee Queen

 

He also noticed that the queues to buy items from the event were a bit shorter than yesterday so, he went and bought a Blizzcon shirt. After the few hours wandering around he came back to watch Starcraft2.

 

The SC2 tournament's final was relayed to the main stage so we watched it there hoping to get good seats for the closing ceremony. It was still 3 hours until the concert, but all decent seats were already taken :(.  We stayed to check out the Tenacious D concert, and enjoyed it a lot.

 

SUNDAY: GOING HOME

 

Boring travel day. Woke up at 5 am Sunday, at home 5 pm Monday. Thanks timezones... Nevertheless the trip was amazing and we both hope we’ll be able to participate again in the future. We’d like to thank Blizzard for inviting us and giving us a chance to experience something special half the world away from Finland. Our special, huge thanks go to everyone who helped us when we had problems! Marc, Tobias, Liam, Matt, Rob, and the guy with 3 letter name with “i” in middle… also I think it ended with a k (sorry I forgot your name!), Josh and everyone else I forgot to mention here! Also thanks to the devs we met. Especially Ion, Daelo and Ghostcrawler. Sorry Diablo 3 devs, the WoW devs are just better! ;)