Written by: OmegaBob

Thursday 8/20

We spent the early part of the day at Venice Beach, and then later explored LA and Hollywood. I joined the paparazzi for a few minutes by staking out Ciara and later saw the cameraman from ‘Jackass’ at a farmers market (his female companion was hot but looked like a word that rhymes with witch).

After a very exciting day of fun and festivities, we drove back to the hotel in the evening to pick up the BlizzCon badges and goodie bags. We passed numerous potential attendees as we continued our drive and I had the urge to scream, “Nerds!” or “EverQuest rules!”, at them as we drove by. Why, because 80% of the fools were wearing their badges as well as their BlizzCon T-Shirts -note: the con starts on Friday, so there was no reason for them to wear their badges or con shirts the day before. Nerds!

We arrived at the convention center at 9pm, an hour before the registration was scheduled to close and there was a surprisingly large number of people still hanging around the exterior of the building as well as heading in to register.

This year, Blizzard rented out another hall at the center as well as the basement for the registration process. The basement hall was literally wall-to-wall with the cattle lines – the largest that I have ever seen (larger than what I’ve been experiencing at Disneyland). I asked a Blizz, employee who was directing the streaming fanboys still entering the center, what the largest amount of people in the hall was during the process and he said at max, the hall was filled to approximately ¾ capacity.

The goodie bag, itself, was a huge disappointment, especially compared to the previous year’s Con. The main attraction of the bag was the Noobz Raynor figurine. Extras included an authenticator (got one last year), hand gel, a metal key and an invitation for separate in-con metagames. The rest of the items were all advertising flyers and fluff.

OmegaBob is a long time Avault reader and forums contributor that has volunteered to cover all things BlizzCon for us this week.