World of Warcraft at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

If you thought the BlizzCon '08 ticket purchasing fiasco was bad, you should have tried getting a murloc plushie. Apparently the ticket buying experience was just a foreshadowing of how poorly the people management would play out at the conference. Of course the fans are not blameless either, at least the ones with OCD that stayed up for days clicking on the shopping cart to get a ticket. Those same people started lining up Thursday night, just to get the swag bag and their tickets (which we got by walking up a while later with no wait). There was less than zero reason for people to be in line, but when you are used to queuing up for BGs, I guess it makes sense. So BlizzCon minus one day and the lines are already silly. Maybe Disney lines are contagious?

When you go to BlizzCon, you enter the World of Linecraft.

Friday is raid day.
I should never underestimate a group of people that have the kind of fortitude to run the same instance one hundred times for a rare drop. Those same people got in line for the BlizzCon store when the doors opened. A few of my friends were nuts enough to PUG and jump into that line. Like a raid, it was two and a half hours later, and they emerged cranky and punch drunk, but piled high with BCon loot (I didn't tell them that they could get the same loot from the auction house/webstore).  

The lines were long almost everywhere. Want a job at Blizzard? Stand in this fairly long line (50ish people). Want some Dippin' Dots? Lucky you, it's only 10-15 people to the front of the line. Want anything with WoW printed on it like a T-shirt? You have a better chance at getting the Phoenix mount to drop. The crew at Jinx! may or may not have planned accordingly because the line for their booth never got shorter than a couple of hundred people. That could be considered great business because they were selling so much, or the worst planning ever because they should have had more efficiency to sell their goods faster!

Trying to get a t-shirt was like running the same instance 100 times to get one rare drop.

Saturday is queue for your favorite panel day.
World of Warcraft has ten or eleven million subscribers (what's a million here or there?). Why in the name of all things popular would they hold a WoW Class discussion in a room that holds a few hundred people (at best)? Oh that's right, they were testing the patience of the attendees by making them stand in line for the panels. At 2:30 people were lined up for the 4:30 panel, I kid you not. I didn't know whether to be impressed by their patience and understanding or appalled.

All the cool kids are doing it.
The lines extended beyond the BlizzCon hall as well. I thought Starbucks was selling murloc plushies since the line there went around the corner and down the hall the entire weekend. The only place I didn't see a line was at the many mobile bars inside the conference. I'm sure that says something about the crowd, but I will leave the speculation to you. I downed a few cold ones just to numb the pain from standing in line.

Blizzard makes no bones about their desire to showcase all of their video games as eSports.  In true sporting fashion, the best seat for BlizzCon may have been from the comfort of your home watching on DirecTV.