MMORPG.com Community Manager Richard Cox attended BlizzCon over the weekend and today presents us with this overview of the event including announcements from all of your favorite Blizzard games.

As many of you who were following my blog over the weekend know, I was at BlizzCon again this year. For those of you who followed those daily reports, no fear, there will be stuff here I didn't talk about there. For those of you, who didn't, feel free to head over and check those entries out as well. Most of it will be covered here, but you never know.

First of all, I'll get all bias out of the way. I absolutely love BlizzCon. And no, it isn't because I'm a WoW fanboy, I don't even currently play WoW. Nor am I really a fanboy of any of their other games. I love the Diablo series, but come on; it's been years and years since I've played D2. Nope, none of that is the reason. I love BlizzCon because as a Community Manager, and one who has worked both IN the industry and in the press covering the industry, I recognize BlizzCon as THE standard when it comes to running a community appreciation event. I've been to most of them; DAoC's Roundtables, SOE's Fan Faires, etc, none of them even come remotely close to BlizzCon. In my opinion one of the most important things a company can do to show appreciation to their community is have a great live event with fun activities, tournaments, great swag and devs accessible to the community. Blizzard does all of this in spades with BlizzCon. So if you're in the industry and in a community relations role in said industry, and aren't attending BlizzCon to take notes when it rolls around, you're doing your community a great disservice.

Read the article here.

/ninja

you need a link there buddy

Originally posted by miagisan

/ninja

you need a link there buddy

Takes a few seconds for me to get that linked in after making the page :) patience. :)

patience is a virtue young grasshopper!

unfortunately i feel old today...so you get the upptiy old man

Hello,

Thank you for your review of the event. I was there with a friend both days. Although I am a casual game player, I have to admit I found this event some what fun for what it was. I was hoping for something that was more community driven though. Very little of what they did at this show brought the community together. It was a show rather than a gathering. Sure the opening ceremony was nice, we got to listen to the president of Blizzard give his hype about the company and the Con. I found some of the panels interesting. And the closing was very nice with all of the music and comedy.

The only parts of this show that I felt tried to bring the community together were the stage contests... Costume, Dance and /Silly contests.

Other community events I've been to, they've had banquet halls where everyone attending would have the chance to sit down and have dinner with each other while listening to the stage act. They had server gatherings, real live quests (not just visiting shops and standing in hour long lines) and contests (not just for the people that were pre-qualified). And t-shirt was given to each and every one of the guests as well as a bag of swag.

Yes, I know that doing these types of things for the mass amount of people WOW attracts would be very difficult to pull off but I feel there could have been so much more for the community rather than the show we got. Heck, I would have paid an extra $100 for a dinner and a night at Disneyland.

Blizzcon to me felt like a scaled down version of E3 rather than the community event it should have been. Would I go again? Probably, like I said before, I found some parts of it interesting.

~V
 

What, no mention of the WoW movie? no preview they said could be in this year's blizzcon? no info on even when a preview could be seen? well, another reason Blizzard annoys me of late, saying things are coming, but taking their grand ole time getting it done. The word stagnant comes to mind when it comes to World of Warcraft and this supposed movie. It's why I left and why I'm not coming back until they fix the lack of content over such a length of time.

Originally posted by Velsha

Hello,

Thank you for your review of the event. I was there with a friend both days. Although I am a casual game player, I have to admit I found this event some what fun for what it was. I was hoping for something that was more community driven though. Very little of what they did at this show brought the community together. It was a show rather than a gathering. Sure the opening ceremony was nice, we got to listen to the president of Blizzard give his hype about the company and the Con. I found some of the panels interesting. And the closing was very nice with all of the music and comedy.

The only parts of this show that I felt tried to bring the community together were the stage contests... Costume, Dance and /Silly contests.

Other community events I've been to, they've had banquet halls where everyone attending would have the chance to sit down and have dinner with each other while listening to the stage act. They had server gatherings, real live quests (not just visiting shops and standing in hour long lines) and contests (not just for the people that were pre-qualified). And t-shirt was given to each and every one of the guests as well as a bag of swag.

Yes, I know that doing these types of things for the mass amount of people WOW attracts would be very difficult to pull off but I feel there could have been so much more for the community rather than the show we got. Heck, I would have paid an extra $100 for a dinner and a night at Disneyland.

Blizzcon to me felt like a scaled down version of E3 rather than the community event it should have been. Would I go again? Probably, like I said before, I found some parts of it interesting.

~V
 

Oh I definitely agree, some of the other events definitely have a more "community togetherness" feel to them, but that's a lot easier to do when, take the DAoC Roundtable for example, you "sell out" of tickets at around 350 people instead of 15,000. Or even a couple thousand like SOE's events it's still doable, but once you've gotten to the numbers that BlizzCon attracts, you're pretty much forced to let the community come up with their own. I saw lots of big groups of people who met up in the 'Realm Meet-Up' areas who went from there. I will say though, having experience working on that side of the fence, setting up community events, it is very hard to balance the level of community related events versus just free time and options to do stuff. Lotsa people who come out to these things don't necessarily want the entire event to be planned out and scheduled for them, they prefer the looser approach with just optional events and panels. I couldn't imagine trying to do it at this level.

Originally posted by elocke

What, no mention of the WoW movie? no preview they said could be in this year's blizzcon? no info on even when a preview could be seen? well, another reason Blizzard annoys me of late, saying things are coming, but taking their grand ole time getting it done. The word stagnant comes to mind when it comes to World of Warcraft and this supposed movie. It's why I left and why I'm not coming back until they fix the lack of content over such a length of time.

There was one very brief mention of the movie, in the Q&A panel someone asked about it, and was given a very vague "It's going to be amazing!" answer, or something along those lines. But that was it really.

Hey Richard did you hear the Buzz going around that there was some pretty Big Changes to the whole  Battle.net Forum system (Including WoWs )  in the works? One guy brought it up...and there was a quick no comment and the music started blaring again...did you hear about any of this?

Nice review.

One question:  Did you ask (or was there any mention) of the new secret MMO Blizzard is working on?  If it's a fantasy title, I will be especially interested.

WOW is great, but after four years, I'm ready for a new MMO world to adventure in.

Monetizing BNet? Starcraft 2 released as three seperate games? 

Apparently Blizzard does not have enough money so they need to milk these games as much as they can. Sad.

Originally posted by Kunou

Originally posted by elocke

What, no mention of the WoW movie? no preview they said could be in this year's blizzcon? no info on even when a preview could be seen? well, another reason Blizzard annoys me of late, saying things are coming, but taking their grand ole time getting it done. The word stagnant comes to mind when it comes to World of Warcraft and this supposed movie. It's why I left and why I'm not coming back until they fix the lack of content over such a length of time.

 

There was one very brief mention of the movie, in the Q&A panel someone asked about it, and was given a very vague "It's going to be amazing!" answer, or something along those lines. But that was it really.

I just want to offer to write the final scene in the movie.  Our hero gets to level 70, you hear this loud "DING", then music starts to play and the credits begin to roll.

Perhaps the final credits appear something like this:

Girl in Tavern...  Lisa So-and-So

Orc #1, Orc #2, Orc #3... The Watson brothers

Gnome in Auction House ...  Jimmy LePeters

Shaman Trainer ... William Shatner

Etc..., you get the idea.

Originally posted by todeswulf

Hey Richard did you hear the Buzz going around that there was some pretty Big Changes to the whole  Battle.net Forum system (Including WoWs )  in the works? One guy brought it up...and there was a quick no comment and the music started blaring again...did you hear about any of this?

Nope, the only thing I heard of regarding BNet is them trying to come up with ways to make money off of it... That may or may not include the forums, who knows. But I will say I don't know how much credibility I put in that report, cause I've never really had anyone from Blizzard so blatantly dodge one of my questions like that. Sure, it may very well be something they can't talk about, but I've never gotten the 'no comment' brush off...

Originally posted by pencilrick

Nice review.

One question:  Did you ask (or was there any mention) of the new secret MMO Blizzard is working on?  If it's a fantasy title, I will be especially interested.

WOW is great, but after four years, I'm ready for a new MMO world to adventure in.

Oh trust me I asked, as futile as I knew asking would be. This is Blizzard we're talking about here, they won't be talking about that project at all for quite a while to come I'm surem specially with all the attention they can milk out of D3 and SC2 for the time being, saving the new MMO for after the hype on those 2 die down is a fairly smart PR move.

The con was a blast, better then last years, better goody bag =P.  They did better at having enough merchandise to sell, lots of cool booths, loved the AMD one, those PMS clan ladies are crazy heh.

The concert was amazing, was cool seeing all their games being able to play, they even had a retro gaming area for their old games.

the beta code we got is for starcraft 2 woot!  no really big news from them except the new class for diablo.  there was just way more to see and do, the year before you could pretty much do everything in one day, this year was much better, the lines to get in seemed huge but it started moving quick.

I'll go everytime they have one, well worth the 100 i spent.