Massively^™

On the surface, one might think that there's no major differences between Blizzard's BlizzCon and SOE's Fan Faire. Both events are there to bring players together in the interest of geeking out on their favorite games from the two respective companies. That said, there are some distinct variations in purpose: Blizzard has stated they'll only do BlizzCon when they have something to show. Meanwhile SOE has been hosting Fan Faire since 2000. For the first three years there were multiple Fan Faires each year.

As we attended both events this year, we thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast some of the good and bad from both weekends. Curious as to how the two events played out? Check out our gallery tour of some of the common experiences from these two conventions and see how they stack up.

Tracey John from MTV Multiplayer was recently given a tour of Blizzard Entertainment's Headquarters in Irvine, California, just before BlizzCon 2008.

Executive VP of Game Design Rob Pardo led them on the tour of the campus as they filmed the whole thing, from the Blizzard Museum (with a signed script of Make Love Not Warcraft) to a dedicated theater for the staff. It's an interesting look at some of the perks employees get for putting in all those hours, and the campus itself seems like a great place to work. Check out the video below the cut.

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

Alright, so the sky is falling. Pretty soon, the world will be dominated by mohawks, black leather and hand-built muscle cars in a never-ending deathmatch over who gets to eat the roadkill. Okay, maybe it won't be that bad -- but unless you've been stranded on a desert island for the past year, you know that there's a global economic crisis going on. But worry not: MMOs -- World of Warcraft in particular -- will be just fine, according to Blizzard Executive VP Rob Pardo.

He said that WoW is immune to economic downturn because it offers an excellent bargain: "People might not want to go out to the movies and spend $100 for a couple of hours and then go to a restaurant. You can go home and pay $15 a month for 100 hours of entertainment if you're staying at home more." A comparable situation from history: during the Great Depression, movies in the United States were only a nickel -- far cheaper than competing, live forms of entertainment, so the movie industry thrived. In fact, some folks credit the Great Depression as a contributor to the rise of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Think the same'll happen to MMOs if this gets bad?

We almost missed this major revelation on our sister site WoW Insider -- we might not have caught it if Eurogamer hadn't. Deep within WoW Insider's excellent liveblog of the World of Warcraft PvP panel at Blizzcon, you'll find that Blizzard reps let slip that players will soon be able to earn experience points in addition to honor in PvP.

That's already possible in WoW's new competitor Warhammer Online, in which it is essentially just as viable to level up to the cap in PvP as it is in PvE. The WoW devs are likely responding to the competition, knowing that they might lose big fans of PvP to WAR. In that vein, they're also ensuring that daily PvP quests are available from levels 10 - 80.

It's hard not to look at this as a good change. The only argument against it we can think of is that if a player levels from 10 - 80 entirely in the battlegrounds, he or she will not have the necessary experience to run instances and raids at later levels if a change of course is desired. But that seems like a fairly minor criticism of a long-needed addition to the game.

Speaking to MTV Multiplayer, World of Warcraft game director Jeffrey Kaplan dropped several vague hints about Blizzard's "next-gen MMO," which is called that because so far the only info we've seen has been in job postings carrying that label. The hints don't count for much, but they're the most we've heard about the game so far.

Kaplan, who revealed he is involved in the project, was asked if the game's genre would be science fiction, post-apocalyptic, or historical, and while laughing he responded: "all of those combined!" We're not sure what to make of that. Citing the console experience of the development team, he also hinted at what we already suspected: Blizzard is at least considering releasing its next MMO on consoles. However, the game is "early in development," which makes us wonder if it might not be for today's consoles, but rather the next generation.

[Via Rock, Paper Shotgun]

BlizzCon 2008 came to an end, yesterday, drawing to a close ground zero for World of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo players fandom. Another solid round of panels, interviews, and presentations for fans of Blizzard's numerous games fleshed out the second and final day of the event. WoW Insider, Massively's big sister site, was onhand to get all the info you want to hear about. So ... here it is: BlizzCon Day 2.

	WoW Raids and Dungeons Panel We'll be blogging the Raids and Dungeons panel live from the floor of BlizzCon, which should prove to be awesome. Full updates will be behind the break, so make sure you keep up! It will be starting in just a moment.
	WoW PvP Panel We're liveblogging the PvP panel from the floor of BlizzCon. Updates start after the break.
	WoW Insider meets The Guild We here at WoW Insider have been big fans of The Guild since day one -- way before Felicia Day sold appliances or hung out with Dr. Horrible, we knew she and her show were something special. And so, when we finally got a chance to meet The Guild today at BlizzCon, we made sure to take it.
	Day 2 class panel I know what you're thinking. "Didn't we have a class panel yesterday?" Well, of course we did, but as exciting as it was we had to come back for a second helping. We're live on the BlizzCon show floor, bringing you the latest class news and information straight from the developers' mouths and starting... right now!

Sometimes, just sometimes, words aren't enough to express a person's love for any particular game. In cases where your fan-cup overfloweth, we often recommend playing your favorite tracks from the franchise/game of your choice. While the music is rocking you are to dance around fervently, making jazz-hands and other increasingly faux-street maneuvers until the music finishes. If after this display of (assumed) exceptionally powerful fan dancing you remain wholly unembarrassed, well you know what to do next: dress up like characters from the game!

At this year's BlizzCon, we're treated with some fairly impressive pictures of cosplayers thanks to WoW Insider's diligent camera-pointy-clicking (industry term) throughout day one of the event. And while some pictures are more ... akward ... than others, you'll be pleasantly surprised by quite a few. Check 'em out in the gallery below.

Yesterday was the first day of BlizzCon 2008, a cornucopia of awesome for every World of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo player on the planet. Though there wasn't the usual megaton announcement we've come to expect, there was a solid round of panels, interviews, and presentations for fans of Blizzard's numerous games. WoW Insider, Massively's big sister site, was onhand to get all the info you want to hear about. So ... here it is: BlizzCon Day 1.

	BlizzCon 2008 swag bag Fresh from the check-in lines at BlizzCon is our gallery of the all the contents of the goodies bag Blizzard gave us. Some real great things in there: special goo, a free authenticator, the special mount card, a beer bottle cooler, and either an inflatable frostmourne or inflatable bubble hearth beach ball.
	WoW Insider interviews J. Allen Brack Here at BlizzCon, we just got to sit down with the head honcho of our favorite game, J. Allen Brack, lead producer of World of Warcraft. And the biggest surprise of the interview wasn't a nice tidbit about the future of WoW (and its battlegrounds) or how class changes are made, though we did talk about both of those things.
	Class panel liveblog WoW Insider is doing a lot of coverage today here at BlizzCon in Anaheim, C.A. We've already live-blogged the opening ceremony, the U.I. panel and discussion, and up next will be the live blog of the class panel at 4:30 EDT / 1:30 PDT.
	BlizzCon 2008: The costumes The best part of coming to a convention like BlizzCon? Sure, the news is great, and it's fun to meet the devs and fellow WoW players, but let's be serious: everyone comes to see the costumes.

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

Blizzcon starts tomorrow in Anaheim, CA, and WoW Insider and Massively are already on-site to provide the best coverage we can! If you're in town, we want to invite you to the WoW Insider meetup tonight at 8:00 PM Anaheim time. You'll have chances to win cool prizes and swag if you know your World of Warcraft trivia, and the WoW Insider podcast will be taped in front of a live audience, so you can be a part of that mayhem as well.

The meetup will be at The Lost Bar at 1150 W. Magic Way, near the Disneyland Hotel. The party will go on through much of the night, so even if you're not getting in until after 8:00, feel free to show up late and relax with the WoW Insider crew post-flight or drive.

A personal apology given by Mike Morhaime should spark a light of hope in those who missed out on getting any BlizzCon tickets due to large amounts of technical difficulties. In addition to the promise of this whole thing never happening again, there are now going to be an additional 3,000 tickets available for purchase. The news comes in light of the convention hall planning being rearranged to accommodate more attendees. Anyone thinking about picking up one of these tickets should know that the offer is only open to those with an active Blizzard Account as of 9:00 PM PDT on August 12th, which is when the "Sold Out" notice was originally posted.

As WoW Insider notes, while 3,000 more tickets are nice, it's probably not going to cover the breadth of everybody who was left out in the cold by technical issues. Can we really ask for any more than this, though? It's not like Blizzard is in a position where they really had to make this choice. They do run the biggest subscription-based MMO on the face of the planet. However you may feel about this whole thing, we can be certain to agree on hoping that it's truly the last time we see such a big technical slip-up from Blizzard.

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

We've been keeping a watchful eye on the Blizzcon site this morning, as we knew that tickets for the event were set to go on sale today. Even with the hefty $100 pricetag, these golden tickets of Blizzard fun are expected to sell out extremely quickly. However, if you're in the market for a Blizzcon ticket, we have some mixed news for you.

While it does appear that the tickets are showing up on the Blizzcon site, and they are allowing you to add up to 5 per cart -- we've not heard of a single purchase that has gone through as yet. It would appear that while Blizzard has done a great job of balancing the load on many of the World of Warcraft servers, the Blizzard store is not handling the zerg rush of thousands of Blizzard fans hitting it all at once very well.

So if you're hoping to land Blizzcon tickets, we suggest you grab a drink and settle in for some quality time with the fail murloc and your F5 key. We'll be right there with you.

[Update 11:13 AM EST] - Aredek on the WoW forums says that their Webfolk are looking into the problems with ordering. In the meantime, we've learned that the fail murloc enjoys mrglrgrrrlgl, long walks by the mggrgrlllrgrm, and enjoys playing gllllrmgrl when not hanging out in our web browsers.

[Update 6:03 PM EST] - While registration was open briefly this afternoon, most people have been unable to purchase tickets due to the heavy traffic on the Blizzcon site. Server fall down go boom. As of now, the site appears to be back in a maintenance phase. From what we have heard, the tickets are not sold out currently.

[Update 7:40 PM EST] The Blizzcon site is back online, however with it returns Failoc, the dreaded murloc of fail. Of course, that's when we're not seeing errors due to the server being overloaded.

[Update 12:10 AM EST] Finally managed to get an order through and confirmed. Looks like some of the WoW Insider crew have also been able to get tickets, but others are still getting Failoc'd. Good luck, everyone!

[Update 12:45 AM EST] According to Eyonix on the Blizzard forums, they are pulling down ticket ordering for the night:

We are continuing our work on bringing the website back up, however, we have decided that we do not want to make everyone wait until the early hours of the morning, hoping at a chance to purchase tickets. Thus, we will not bring up the website until after the beginning of business day tomorrow, Tuesday, August 12. We want to assure everyone that a great majority of tickets are still available for purchase.

If you've been waiting up to purchase a ticket, looks like it's time to head for bedfordshire and try again in the morning.

With BlizzCon a little more than two months away, Blizzard is gearing up for the event with the recent launch of the new BlizzCon 2008 website. From this site, fans will be able to find new information on this year's panels, contests and tournaments. Plus, there's the new feature from DIRECTV where those not attending the event will have the chance to watch it live for the first time ever. DIRECTV is offering a special promotion for new subscribers to get the event for free, by following a special link.

This site's launch comes only days before the tickets go on sale for this Anaheim, CA event, which should help in hotel and travel accommodation planning. Be sure to check the site often for more details to come.

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	One of Azeroth's millions of citizens? Check out our ongoing coverage of the World of Warcraft, and be sure to touch base with our sister site WoW Insider for all your Lich King needs!

According to a new press release, tickets for Blizzcon 2008 will be available for purchase at the event's official website on August 11th. You might not need to buy them, though, because the press release also announced that at least 8 hours of the event will stream live to DirectTV customers pay-per-view style.

Prices for the DirectTV route haven't been released yet, but folks who want to actually attend the convention in Anaheim, CA must pay $100 per head. That's probably a fair price if you're a hardcore Blizzard fan who wants to get hands-on time with upcoming games. And then there are the dance competitions!

The event will occur on October 10th and 11th.