I was reading your latest post, about having the word ‘Chick’ in your blog title, and I was inspired to write you a letter, since this is way too long for a comment on the post.

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As most of you know by now, I’m sure, when Blizzcon tickets went on sale, there were a lot of problems.

My two good friends, Doodlebug and Eustacious, are pretty crushed. They are friends that are doing The Road to Blizzcon comic, and were actually going to meet together in real life and go to Blizzcon together.

Doodlebug got his ticket… Eustacious was online at the same time as Doodle, both were talking to each other, cheering each other on… Eustacious had his tickets too, but once he got to the actual ‘pay and place your order’ screen, they were sold out.

On the official World of Warcraft site, Mike Morhaime has made an announcement about the problems people had with the Blizzcon tickets.

Blizzard Gamers,

On behalf of everyone at Blizzard, I want to apologize for the challenges and frustrations you experienced while trying to purchase BlizzCon tickets on Monday and Tuesday. BlizzCon is about the positive experiences you all have had with Blizzard games. As a result of this week’s events, the excitement that many of you felt about the show has turned into dissatisfaction and disappointment.

Due to these circumstances, we’ve reevaluated our convention hall space and come up with some solutions that will allow us to offer 3,000 more tickets for sale. We know this will not be enough to satisfy the very high level of demand for tickets this year, but we want to ensure that BlizzCon remains a great experience for those of you who are able to attend. To avoid the issues many of you faced this week, we’ll be selling these 3,000 via a lottery. We’ll post further details once our plans are finalized. Please note that the lottery will only be open to those with an active Blizzard Account as of 9:00 PM PDT on August 12, the time that the “Sold Out” notice was posted.

I, and everyone else at Blizzard, share the frustration and disappointment that many of you have expressed as a result of this process. We’ll do what it takes to avoid this type of situation in the future.

Sincerely,
Mike Morhaime

May I say, from the depths of my heart, that I hope that everyone that I know, and everyone that visits here, who truly wanted tickets to Blizzcon gets lucky on the lottery.

Sadly, someone has to lose, so let it be all those faceless strangers that aren’t wise enough to read my site.

For myself, there shall be no Blizzcon.

Cassie and I talked about it, and we agreed that if we’d discussed it 9 months ago, and made plans to have it be part of our families’ week long summer vacation, then we might have been able to swing it. Having to buy a $100 ticket for our son Alex would have been stupid, but okay. We could have done it. But we didn’t.

Maybe next year.

For myself, I’ve got a friend with Direct TV.

I’ve already talked to him, and I’m gonna give him the $40 for the Pay Per View of the Blizzcon, and he’s gonna Tivo it for me and give me the code for the polar bear mount with the murloc hat.

Then he’s gonna make me some tapes of the 16 hours of Blizzcon off of Tivo, and I’ll be able to watch it in the comfort of my own home.

Is it the same as being there?

No, but this way I can drink lots of Guinness and shout insults at the screen as they announce lies about my Druid getting Dire Cat form.

Good times, good times….

*whistles*

Andrige just emailed me to let me know he’d found a few interesting things… and that he made a YouTube to share them.

To quote Andrige;

Found some quite interesting features in the datafiles for Bear.m2, which is not the same model as our Dire Bear for Druids but at least up until right now, we’ve shared the same animations as ordinary bears in our forms. I found it quite odd that they decided that an NPC bear should be able to fish and eat, an issue important enough that they added an animation for it.

So I’m thinking they’ll add these emotes to our bear forms to make it able to eat and fish in forms, as well as showing they are creating animations to shut the gaping hole that is our mouth when it’s not necessary to show your fangs.

And here is the YouTube that Andrige created from Bear.m2. Enjoy!

It is, perhaps, a sign that I’m not a nice person, when I read a story about someone else’s misery, and start laughing my big butt off.

This weekend, at the same time Sidhe Devils was in Karazhan, our friends in Blood for Blood were also in there.

Now, both guilds took about the same amount of time to clear it, and had the same success.

We had some confusion in our own run, two brand new members came in to have fun, and got taken out of the game by a thunderstorm rolling through their area. So we lost about an hour and a half, all things considered, finding a few more folks, getting them in and filling it out.

There might have been a ‘Jets vs Sharks’ dance fight in Curator’s Hall while we waited. And the gals might have won. Maybe. I’ll neither confirm nor deny. Damn it. We woulda had it except Morthog stayed in Dwarf form. Next time, do a /dance with the flaming Draenei statue, man! Just saying.

It turned out great for us, though, since one of the folks that we pounced on the second he logged in, and proceeded to drag kicking and screaming into Kara was Eustacius, co-creator of Road to BlizzCon, and as he mentioned on his own blog… for him, it was Christmas in July.

I love it when that happens. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, either.

So we had a slow down during the run, kept us up a lot later than we expected… but hey, when it ends up giving Wulfa a chance to get her Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix… well…. YAHOO! I’ll stay up. Yup! Not a problem. Truthfully, I’ve been rooting for her to get that bow for weeks now…. I think it’s very pretty.

Now, as I said, Blood for Blood also went in and had a successful run in Kara at the same time, and took about the same amount of time to do it.

However, the reason for their delay was a little bit different.

Graimerin wrote about it on his blog, and as I read about his pain and sorrow while tanking in there with this one really bad player… as I said at the start of this article, I was rolling with laughter.

Why?

Well, there was this one part that brought back the memories…

Grai said;

We were moving through upper ballroom pulling the non-elite trash near the doorway to maidens hallway. Again we had someone pull the elite group, so I run over to where the healers are grouped, consecrate, have all the nasties on me, and then ‘poof’ they leave me.

3B on my honor this is the truth, when the mobs suddenly depart from me I look up and see that I got DI’d; yeah one of our pally healers DI’d the tank. Needless to say we wiped again.

And as I read that, I remembered that feeling…

that feeling you get when everything goes to hell, with mobs running around smacking the people under your protection, and panic and terror runs wild through the squishies, and you hold your cool, stay calm and collected, run over to reclaim aggro and bring order out of chaos… and then watch it all fall apart with no clue what the hell just happened.

And you ask yourself, “Why can’t I do anything?”

And then look up and notice, sitting there grouped amidst the 10 other raid buff icons, that little symbol that says, “Hi, you done been protected by Divine Intervention… sucker.”

Yep, I read Grai’s rundown of the event, and all I could do was yell at the screen that blessed quote from the first Die Hard movie…

“Welcome to the party, pal!”

Doodle and Eustacious have been traveling, oh just everywhere trying to find their Blizzcon.

They meet some of the strangest people.

Of course, once they met the leader of the Dwarfs in AV, they had to show their respect…

before getting down to business.