E
Eldorian
Guest
Day 1 of the World Wide Invitational has come and gone and Day 2 is about to begin, but before I get information overload I wanted to share my thoughts on the first day.
Needless to say the event started out with a bang at the opening ceremony with the announcement of Diablo 3, seeing the cinematic, and watching the demo. Unfortunately they do not have the game playable here, I am completely expecting it to be playable though at Blizzcon in October. The rest of my morning was spent in the press room getting up information for all the readers about the opening ceremony.
In the early afternoon I had a chance to attend the live raid that Nihilum was doing against Kil'jaeden - and they failed twice to down the beast only needing maybe 1-2% more DPS to finish him off but fell short. Afterwards there was the Q&A with WoW developers and one of the questions brought up was if they were going to nerf Kil'jaeden since he is so hard and that failed raid by Nihilum proved that. Luckily J. Allen Barack responded that there wouldn't be such a thing happening anytime in the forseeable future as Blizzard stands firm that it brings a nice challenge to the gamers that want it. There were several other questions (and I have some of the panel on video) - however, I'll elaborate on that on a individual article soon.
Once the Q&A was finished the dance and costume contest started and was followed by the awards ceremony. Once again the costumes this year were phenomenal and Tauren picture you can find in the WWI 08 Gallery page was the winner even though I felt (and so did the crowd) that the Murloc should have won. I'll have pictures of the event including full video of the contest once I return to the States.
The night was then followed up by dinner again with the Blizzard community team. I was able to talk with Tseric and Nethera while there. First of all I had to brag to them about Diablo 3 being announced since the night before I kept trying to pull information from them and telling them it's Diablo 3 - with no success on getting information (and wasn't expecting to get it). So we discussed Diablo for a bit and that's when I started asking about the splash screen and the Purple Penguin which was hidden in the master.css file.
I was told the splash screen was obviously leading up to the Diablo announcement, but they did it in a way to make people wonder what it was. One of the things they pointed out that was funny was how WoW fans were saying it was Arthas, Starcraft fans were saying it was a Starcraft MMO, and Diablo fans guessed right that it was Diablo 3. The runes didn't have much of a rhyme or reason other than just mess with the people who wanted to speculate on what it was.
This is when I realized that pretty much everyone has forgotten about the hidden purple penguin in the master.css file so I asked about that. I was told that the web team had wanted to do something just to mess with people. They had an artist who had done some early work on Wrath of the Lich King and he had drawn this evil looking purple penguin which had nothing to do with anything Blizzard was doing. The web team really liked the picture so they decided to use it. The numbers didn't correspond with any letters like speculators were believing, they were simply the numbers from the Lost TV series. All of this was put together by the web team just to simply mess with people and cause further speculation on what it could mean for their own enjoyment to see how people would react.
And this my friends is why I like Blizzard so much and why I've been playing their games for the last 15 years. Not only do they make brilliant games, but they have fun doing it.
More...
Needless to say the event started out with a bang at the opening ceremony with the announcement of Diablo 3, seeing the cinematic, and watching the demo. Unfortunately they do not have the game playable here, I am completely expecting it to be playable though at Blizzcon in October. The rest of my morning was spent in the press room getting up information for all the readers about the opening ceremony.
In the early afternoon I had a chance to attend the live raid that Nihilum was doing against Kil'jaeden - and they failed twice to down the beast only needing maybe 1-2% more DPS to finish him off but fell short. Afterwards there was the Q&A with WoW developers and one of the questions brought up was if they were going to nerf Kil'jaeden since he is so hard and that failed raid by Nihilum proved that. Luckily J. Allen Barack responded that there wouldn't be such a thing happening anytime in the forseeable future as Blizzard stands firm that it brings a nice challenge to the gamers that want it. There were several other questions (and I have some of the panel on video) - however, I'll elaborate on that on a individual article soon.
Once the Q&A was finished the dance and costume contest started and was followed by the awards ceremony. Once again the costumes this year were phenomenal and Tauren picture you can find in the WWI 08 Gallery page was the winner even though I felt (and so did the crowd) that the Murloc should have won. I'll have pictures of the event including full video of the contest once I return to the States.
The night was then followed up by dinner again with the Blizzard community team. I was able to talk with Tseric and Nethera while there. First of all I had to brag to them about Diablo 3 being announced since the night before I kept trying to pull information from them and telling them it's Diablo 3 - with no success on getting information (and wasn't expecting to get it). So we discussed Diablo for a bit and that's when I started asking about the splash screen and the Purple Penguin which was hidden in the master.css file.
I was told the splash screen was obviously leading up to the Diablo announcement, but they did it in a way to make people wonder what it was. One of the things they pointed out that was funny was how WoW fans were saying it was Arthas, Starcraft fans were saying it was a Starcraft MMO, and Diablo fans guessed right that it was Diablo 3. The runes didn't have much of a rhyme or reason other than just mess with the people who wanted to speculate on what it was.
This is when I realized that pretty much everyone has forgotten about the hidden purple penguin in the master.css file so I asked about that. I was told that the web team had wanted to do something just to mess with people. They had an artist who had done some early work on Wrath of the Lich King and he had drawn this evil looking purple penguin which had nothing to do with anything Blizzard was doing. The web team really liked the picture so they decided to use it. The numbers didn't correspond with any letters like speculators were believing, they were simply the numbers from the Lost TV series. All of this was put together by the web team just to simply mess with people and cause further speculation on what it could mean for their own enjoyment to see how people would react.
And this my friends is why I like Blizzard so much and why I've been playing their games for the last 15 years. Not only do they make brilliant games, but they have fun doing it.
More...