Project Lore

As of this writing we are just a scant few minutes away from the doors opening and 50,000+ people descending on all that is Blizzard. The crowds are in a fervor thanks to battle cries of "for the Horde" and "for the Alliance" ringing out every few minutes. Costumes are in play and things are about to get absolutely insane. Here's a few pictures from Day 0 and earlier this morning. Here's the insane line that stretched to the next city block.  This was to pick-up the official lanyards and SWAG bags, not to get in the show! We Just Found The End Waiting...and waiting Here's the insane line that stretched to the next city block.  This was to pick-up the official lanyards and SWAG bags, not to get in the show!

The official SWAG bag.  The highlight for most is the action figure, and Grunty vanity pet key (not pictured).  There's also an included Authenticator, which is nice for those who don't already own one. iTZKooPA With (some of) The Guild My friends and I got to meet the whole cast of The Guild (should have an interview with them later).  They are all incredibly friendly and approachable people. iTZKooPA With The Money Makers Funny story here.  I recognized Metzen from a mile away, but it took me a second to realize who he was chatting with, Mike Morhaime.  None other than the company's president.  The hilarity came in after we took the picture.  People began to realize who Metzen was, but no one else asked Morhaime to be a part of their still.  I thought one group even asked him to take their picture with Metzen! Inside Line Higher Up Inside Line Here is the crowd inside the convention center before the doors opened.  There was also a substantial line outside at this time. I stole SOOO Much OJ From Here The hush-hush super secret press room.  They treat us much better, seating and technologywise, than at E3. Okay, it's time to go find a seat for the opening ceremonies.  I'll do my best to do some blogging via Twitter, so @iTZKooPA if you want my 140 character up to the minute thoughts.

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Less than 30 minutes after tickets went on sale for BlizzCon 2009 Saturday, they already were sold out. I was one of the lucky ones able to snag a pair for my husband and I. But thousands of people still were left in the ticket queue by the time they sold out. Thankfully this year, Blizzard is giving us another chance. A second batch of tickets goes up for sale in two weeks. And now we know exactly how the buying process goes.  Here's how I landed my tickets:

• About an hour before tickets went on sale at 10 a.m. PST, my husband and I both logged onto our individual Battle.net accounts and updated our payment options. The site seemed to be functioning fine as of that time. We went ahead to the Blizzard store page, which redirected us to the ticket sales page. We wanted to have the site loaded up well before the ticket sales began.
• Five minutes before the tickets went on sale, we started refreshing the  page every few seconds. My computer said 12:58 (since I'm on the east coast) when the site refreshed and went from saying "Tickets Unavailable" to "Select Quantity." You can only buy 5 tickets per mailing address.
• It took my computer about five seconds to refresh the page. By then, my husband already was in the queue at position 351. He entered the sales page almost immediately. I, on the other hand, got in the queue only seconds later and was at position 1,708, with an estimated 17-minute wait time. So those few seconds made a big difference.
• I did end up making it to the sales page around 1:15, but it didn't matter. By then, we already had our tickets.

But my time in the queue was interesting. Blizzard put a graphic on the page showing the percentage of tickets still remaining, so we could watch it drop several percentage points every minute. At 1:28 tickets for this round sold out. But by then, tens of thousands of people were waiting in the queue. So, what can we take away from this? If you're hoping to try again for tickets in the next round, get to the page early, and refresh starting a few minutes before the sale. If you get in the queue RIGHT away, you'll have a much better chance of scoring tickets. Both my husband and myself were able to get to the sales page since we entered the queue within seconds of it going up. And don't forget there's another way, too. If you want Grunty the murloc marine but can't attend, you still can watch parts of BlizzCon through pay per view. And, of course, we'll be bringing you the best of the convention here at Project Lore, too! So who else had luck with getting tickets so far? I'm curious how many others had a relatively smooth buying experience like I did. Any of you going to try for tickets on the 30th?

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Taking a gander over at the World of Warcraft Public Test Realm (PTR) site will reveal what many people realized extremely quickly. The PTR Character Copy page is once again live (EU Version Here). What does this mean? Well, Patch 3.1 including certain parts of the new Ulduar raid should be testable soon. We still have no idea when the PTR will actually be available for testing. Some people are speculating as soon as tonight, other have their money on Monday. No official word on an actual time or date has been released, but according to Bornakk, if we have a little patience, we'll see it soon(tm). Unfortunately for many of us, the Character Copy queue filled up in no time flat. It looks like those of us who want to test out some of the new changes or get a sneak peak at Ulduar will have to keep checking back to see if the queue empties out a bit. Right now the average wait time is sitting at 4 days, but hopefully we won't have to wait that long to see the feature re-opened. Last time the PTR Character Copy feature was available, copied characters ended up being deleted and Character Copy was disabled. That was shortly after some of the new 3.1 class changes were announced.  Still, if you manage to get a character copied, I'd say it's worth taking your chances.

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