So I attended BlizzCon last weekend. My brother and I thought it would be a fun thing to do and give us a chance to hang out together which we haven't done for a long long time. So even though I work for GameSpot I went to BlizzCon as a civilian. I packed my PS2 so we could play some Guitar Hero face-off matches at the hotel during non-con hours. It turns out I packed everything required to play Guitar Hero except the power cord. You know, that one that's straight on one side and round on the other? The one that's very specific to the PS2? Ya, I forgot that. I jumped online and found an EB Games within three miles that carried extra power cables. After purchasing the power cable we attempted to hook up the PS2 to the in-room television. The TVs at this particular hotel (Anabella) were so locked down you couldn't use the auxiliary inputs. They were right there on the back but the TV wouldn't actually display anything from it. So determining who the best Guitar Hero player is in the family will have to wait until another time. The first night we checked Ebay to see what people were selling their Goody Bags for. Ready for this? Five hundred dollars! That was about the average asking price on the first night. Most of that is for the in-game Murloc suit. Codes for the Murloc suit itself were going for approximately $400. We thought about making a nice profit for about half a second. Then we decided we wanted the Murloc suit for our own characters. The animations for the Murloc suit are actually quite funny. But you can't enter combat with the suit on. You revert to your normal form if you try that. Day One: The rumors of Wrath of the Lich King had been going around for a couple of days already and seemed pretty solid. When the BlizzCon opened at 9:00 -- two hours prior to the opening keynote at 11:00 -- the big signs, T-shirts and the official program featuring detailed info on Wrath of the Lich King seemed to pretty much seal deal. At 11:00 Wrath of the Lich King was officially announced. The thing is, I haven't even played the content in the first expansion yet. I just learned what tiered armor sets were last weekend. There's still so much content that's readily available now that I haven't played yet but it nice to know there's even more on the way. I'm really looking forward to playing a Death Knight -- a good Death Knight of course. The panel discussions were interesting. The main things I took away from the panels is this: Blizzard acknowledges that Warlocks dominate in small-team PvP situations but tend not as much in larger teams. They don't want to nerf Warlacks to balance small-team PvP at the expense of the Warlock's usefulness on larger teams. Engineering is the selfish profession. They want to add more items which can be used by non-engineers. Rogues are the kings (and queens) of DPS. Even the Death Knight won't out DPS a rogue. People like to complain about their chosen class. One dude who plays a healer actually asked, "Are you going to do anything to make being a healer more fun?" Umm... right. Blizzard originally planned on making every Warcraft III unit it's own class but that idea was canned when it turned out there would be too much overlap between many of the classes. Keeper on the lore, Chris Metzen, likes to rub his forehead a lot as if he's dealing with a headache or something. Oh, and he's for the Horde. Blizzard president Mike Morhaine likes to pause for applause a lot. Even when it's not really happening. That's not to say the crowd was unimpressed with anything he said. It's just that not every sentence is deserving of cheers. John Cash (formerly of id Software) is the lead developer on WoW. I knew he was working for Blizzard but I didn't know he was the head techie on WoW. Killer were giving out these huge "K"-logo things on a chain if you enter a contest by writing a slogan for them. They were about the size of a car's hood ornament. But a little bigger. My brother got one. Easily, the coolest swag of the show. Illidan looks shorter in real life. It seemed like the majority of the crowd as BlizzCon were Horde players. Wanting to learn about the history of the Orcs and the Horde my brother and I went to Wikipedia to get the condensed version of the lore. In the middle of very serious story items is this non-sequitur. "Murlocs kill several-thousand unsuspecting passerbys". Okay, you had to be there but oh, how we laughed.