BlizzCon Friday Wrapup

Besides the Burning Crusade announcement, there's lots of interesting stuff going on out in California. Gamespot reports from the scene and has a first look at the Blood Elf starting area. Meanwhile, Next Generation has the lay of the land from the first day of Blizzard's games get-together. From the Gamespot article: "As for the scene, Morhaime announced that slightly fewer than 8,000 attendees would be at Blizzcon, and there seemed to be about that many people crowding in Hall A of the Anaheim Convention Center. The line for showgoers to pick up their free goody bags seemed to snake as long as a line for a ride at nearby Disneyland, looking to be easily more than an hour's wait. Though there were dozens of computer stations, lines for Blizzcon attendees looking to play the new expansion pack were also quite long. Two GameSpot editors stood in line for about an hour to get 30 minutes of play time with the content."

Comments

From the GameSpot article...

[djflipstarx]

Quite a variety of people have made their way to the show, including parents and children who must have decided that a day at Blizzcon was more critical than spending it at school.

Jack Thompson: PIXELANTES ARE SKIPPING SCHOOL TO ATTEND A GAME CONVENTION?! MORE REASON GAMES ARE EVIL, TRUST ME.

Re:From the GameSpot article...

[Seumas]

People who act like one day of school is the difference between a career and a job make me laugh. Clearly those are people who haven't attended school in many decades. Trust me, one more day of "shut up and be quiet so teacher can recover from her hangover" is not going to help anything.

Besides, I don't know about anyone else, but I could only take so many consecutive days of teacher's tender loving fingers before I needed a day or two break from him.

Re:From the GameSpot article...

[Dachannien]

People who act like one day of school is the difference between a career and a job make me laugh.

Making your kids go to school on-time every day is part of instilling in them a positive work ethic. Of course, when you consider that the parents probably took a sick day to head to Blizzcon with their kids, it all kinda makes sense.

Re:From the GameSpot article...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found from personal experience (I am 21 atm) that skipping a day now and then from high school was the best thing I could have done. It let me get away from the draconian, stifling administration and it let me vent my anxiety over the feeling of being trapped. Its not so much that you have a day off...its that you are in control of your time instead of handing it over to your "jailors" at school. It was truly a psychological boost more than anything else. I learned more in those days off than I ever did it some lame high school class with some teacher who was more concerned with hanging on to his or her pitiful paycheck than educating the students. I learned, most importantly, about myself and my limits as a human being to be coralled and controlled by the school administration.

Blizzard planning on killing modding?

[Anonymous Coward]

World of Warcraft allows third-party UI mods via XML and LUA. Well, some of these mods are apparently entering into a gray area, and are considered to be "too powerful" or something. (I remember a very confusing statement by Blizzard about how mods that allow people to do something that people without the mod can't do are considered too powerful - but isn't that the entire point of a mod?)

So, anyway, there's a rumor going around that they announced at BlizzCon that mods are going to have to be digitally signed in a future content patch. Anyone know if this is true?

If it is true, it will kill all third-party mods, "legal" or not. Even if they allow third-party authors to apply for digital signatures, it will still prevent them from developing at all. You can't develop a modification if you have to get EVERY single version of it signed by Blizzard. Bugs happen, it's a fact of development. If you have to wait a day between tests of various versions, mod development will simply stop.

So, is this true? Does Blizzard really intend to close off modding to their player-base, and only allow certain "golden" mods? I can only hope that this isn't the case.

Re:Blizzard planning on killing modding?

[JavaLord]

I wouldn't be suprised. Mods like decursive, when run by a paladin basically keeps their whole party DoT/Debuff free just by mashing a button. There are healing mods that do the same. To me, they always seemed a bit like cheating.

Re:Blizzard planning on killing modding?

[JavaLord]

These are just UI mods; the intention is to allow you to reconfigure your UI and see information which is given to you, but not in a useful way by the default UI. I'll take the Decursive example. Decursive looks at your party/raid, finds a debuff that you can cure, and uses the correct cure spell on that person, all with one button

Yeah, but take a paladin for example. Say im in a battleground with 7 teammates defending some point. A warlock and priest come up, and debuff/DoT everyone in my group (they are fast!). I can cleanse all 7 of them just by jamming on the decursive button seven times quickly. There is no way humanly possible you could do that without decursive. Those with decursive have a huge advantage over those without.

Video Recordings and Information from BlizzCon 05

[antdude]

WorldofWar.net posted new and confirmed information and media such as photographs, screenshots, and movie footages (including panels and presentations) of the BlizzCon (year 2005). The video presentations are quite funny to hear the fans yelling. Here are some samples of videos:

• Expansion Blood Elf Warrior gameplay Movie [28Mb]
  
• Rob Pardo Video Interview [47Mb]
  
• Sound-alike Contest Movie [86Mb]
  
• Original Song Contest Movie [35Mb]
  
• Dance-Alike Contest Movie [29Mb]
  
• Costume Contest [129mb]