I don’t care if Monday IS blue! I’m here to cheer you up with the latest and greatest geek news on the block. I’m also kind of running out of kitschy pop-culture references to go along with Monday in my opening statements, so if you can help a brother out lemme know.
We’ve got some great news in the works for those of you who attend our track panels this year, but we’re not quite ready to reveal it yet. Suffice it to say, if you thought we had some great events last year you haven’t seen ANYTHING yet. In the meantime, though, get a load of the list below for some other fun things that are going on in the geek world.
You just never know who might be our special guest referee at the WoW Party…
It might even be…
YOU JUST NEVER KNOW!!!
(Seriously, while we would be thrilled to have them there, we do not have plans to involve Felicia Day or William Shatner in the WoW party on Saturday. If they turn up, we’ll be just as surprised as you are.)
I’m back from the beach and ready to put the finishing touches on this year’s preparations. Staff meetings are blessedly short (last night’s was about 20 minutes), which means things are getting done, and the to-do list is finally shrinking.
That means we’re close. 3 weeks to go, in fact!
To give you guys an update as to what’s going on, we’re starting to receive prize packages from some of our “Friends of DC*MMO” (see the column on the left) including t-shirts, posters, boxed copies of games, loot cards, and other assorted goodies that we’ll be giving away. Most of this stuff will be given away during our WoW party (WoW Stuff) and MMO Trivia Contest (Everything Else) during the weekend, but we’ll also be tossing out some swag during our panels. Which ones? Could be any of them!
It looks like the Digital Gaming Lab (DGL) will be moving up to the 3rd floor in the Hilton this year. Normally, that doesn’t affect us since we’re in the Sheraton, but if you actually want some “hands on” time with some of the games that we’ll be highlighting this year, the DGL is the place to be. We’ll be hosting “All-nighters” with Global Agenda and Age of Conan in the DGL this year.
We’ve updated the look of the website just a bit, and included links to the companies and people who have helped us out this year and in the past. These folks have donated time, merchandise, and effort into making Dragon*Con successful, and I’d like to thank them all on behalf of the DC*MMO staff.
Finally, we’re steadily dwindling our supply of DC*MMO 2009 t-shirts. We only have a few of the larger sizes left! We’re also going to have a new SnarkCast available for you later today or tomorrow, and Krystalle and I will try to squeeze in one or two more before the convention.
As a final treat, I wanted to share this picture of the winning team (posing w/the Bling Gnome Trophy) from last year’s Hardcore MMO Trivia Contest. The winners of each year’s trivia contest will win a fantastic set of prizes and have their picture immortalized on the base of the trophy. (last year, we had no base because my crafting skill is 0)
Yeah, I realize that I’m going to run out of sequel titles to use in these posts and that I’ll be repeating myself soon. I’ll deal with that problem when I get there.
It’s been a crazy week in the land of SnarkCast, and Krys and Grim have already been overtaken by events given that we recorded this podcast before:
The Dragon*Con Staff Meeting last weekend.
Blizzard was allowed to partially re-launch WoW in China.
Oh well, them’s the breaks. In any event, enjoy the podcast (show notes are included after the jump). Thanks for listening, and we’ll be recording a new podcast very soon.
Scheduling is pretty much complete and now we turn our attention towards our giveaways, contests, and other events. One such bit of news, for those of you who are interested in attending our WoW Party on Saturday night, is that we will have a cash bar inside the ballroom this year. You will not have to leave the party to obtain performance enhancing substances for our contest this time around.
Our new friends at Comcast (yes, THAT Comcast) have decided to sponsor our WoW party this year and will be adding some fantastic prizes for us to give away. I could tell you… but I’d rather keep it a surprise. You will not be disappointed.
We will also have some goodies to give away during our MMO Trivia contest on Sunday night, courtesy of Sony Online Entertainment, Funcom, Hi-Rez Studios, and a cast of dozens. More details to follow, but I can say that we will probably have more free stuff to give away this year than we did last year… And last year, we had a LOT.
The schedule is pretty much done, and the gang is hard at work on the remaining “to do list” items for Dragon*Con this year. And recent interactions with my staff have indicated that I am getting just a little bit ill-tempered, so this week, I’ll be stepping back and taking a break from D*C prep.
What does Grim do for fun, you ask?
Oddly enough, not much MMO playing. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still play a bit, but currently, I’m working on integrating this site with Facebook, particularly our new application and fan page. Now that might sound perilously close to working on D*C, but I’m looking at this from a “hey, this is a technical challenge” standpoint and indulging my inner hacker by trying to figure out how all this stuff works. It’s very much a work-in-progress, but it’s been quite fun so far.
Of course, my wife has a long list of suggestions for things to do besides Dragon*Con stuff, and I’ve been working on those too. Expect things to be kinda quiet around here for a week or so, but we’ll be back next week for the home stretch. If you really need to reach me, that’s what we have the contact form for, or you could even try Facebook or Twitter. Less than 3 months to go until Dragon*Con!
I know we haven’t updated the site much in the last couple of weeks. Krys is getting ready for E3, and I’ve been busy putting the finishing touches on this year’s schedule.
However, I thought that it might be fun to tell the story of last year’s DC*MMO track in pictures.
First, let’s start with what an average panel looks like on most tracks…
Not too bad, right? I mean, the room is full but not too crowded. What’s interesting about this panel, Guild Management in case you were wondering, is that it was at 2:30 on Friday afternoon. This means that the vast majority of convention attendees were still standing in line waiting for badges or hadn’t arrived at the convention yet. The first panel slot of the con is at 1:00 PM.
This is a little closer to what we expect at such a time slot…
This is common for panels which take place early on Friday afternoon, or Monday. Most folks are straggling in to the convention and you are fortunate to get a dozen people. Of course this particular panel, with about 20 people, happened to be well after midnight (on Sunday, I believe) when most folks are out partying until the wee hours. Our audience is hardcore, folks. We ran “around the clock” at the convention, and had to, just to get everything to fit on the schedule.
But Grim, you ask, what was it like during regular hours? What kind of crowd did you draw for your regular events? I’m glad you asked…
EA/Mythic, if you’re reading this, notice that the crowd spills out of the room (and far down the hallway) for your game, Warhammer Online. We thank you for sending us a copy of the trailer, and these guys really enjoyed it, but even we were surprised at the response to a game that was still a couple of months from release at Dragon*Con last year. And in case you are wondering how much space was left in the room…
Not much…
Now I know what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking that we took pictures of our most popular panels and used them to show a “typical” crowd for an MMO panel. This panel, believe it or not, was not even in our top five in terms of attendance. For one game, in particular, it wasn’t even close.
We’re gonna need a bigger room…
This particular event was for World of Warcraft, which should surprise nobody. Believe it or not, this was not our largest event. Unfortunately, we were too busy having a good time to take pictures of that party.
You may have noticed that there is a gap between the folks on the floor and the folks in seats. It’s for a good reason. We had to have room to punt these little guys all over the room.
Rest assured, the Flying Gnomes will be back with a vengeance this year.
Finally, to close things out last year, we invited anyone who was interested to join us on Monday for coffee and (quiet) chat about whatever subjects interested them. We call this event our “Post MMOrtem” and it’s a chance for folks to talk to us directly and give us feedback on how we did. We listened and I hope we learned enough to improve on last year’s experience which, from our perspective, was the most fun we’ve ever had at Dragon*Con.
(Foreground: Chris “Logan” White (wearing the yellow lanyard), who celebrated his 20th year as a volunteer at Dragon*Con.)
Thank you to everyone who made last year so much fun. Thank you Krystalle, Elizabeth, and Colin from Massively.com. Thanks to our staff last year, Jay, Sheryl, Logan, TJ, Crump, Sam, and especially Trevor, my “number 2″. Thank you to Rafe, Mike, Beej, and all of the other folks who paid to come to Dragon*Con, but stuck around to give us a hand during the convention. Thank you Funcom, Sony, NCSoft (holy crap, that was a lot of swag!!!), AQ Worlds, Wardog Studios, Flying Lab, and all of the other game developers who came to talk to us last year. Most of all, thank you, the fans who made this all possible.
It’s going to be a great year at Dragon*Con this year, and we hope that the MMO track will make some significant strides from last year, which happened to be our very first year as a track of our own. If you were there last year, we look forward to seeing you again this year. If you couldn’t make it, we’ll make room for ya until Mr. Fire Marshall shuts us down. Come on down and see us! (less than 100 days to go!)
I know I promised you guys more frequent updates. Consider this a mini-update until I have time to write a real one later this week.
Voltaire is confirmed. You may resume breathing. (And V, if you’re an MMO fan, we would LOVE to have you MC a few contests for us. Otherwise, *I* might have to do it again this year.)
We have re-added Champions Online. (No Cryptic, but I think you guys will like this…)
We are co-hosting a very special panel with the Space track this year. It seems that NASA did some work on an MMO in the recent past, and even got to the point where they brought in Timothy Zahn to help with the game design. Since we just happen to have Les Johnson from NASA and Mr. Zahn at Dragon*Con this year, we thought it might be a neat idea to discuss the MMO that might have been.
Our Snark Cast is officially on hiatus until my lovely and talented co-host returns from E3 and recovers sufficiently to put up with me once again.
To end things, I thought I would post an old pic that was rediscovered in Ol’ Chumbucket’s archives recently. Behold, a picture of the infamous “Meridian 59 Guy” panel!
(From left to right: Alihja, Grim, Crumpster, and “The Meridian 59 Guy”)
First off, let me say that Brian “Psychochild” Green is a super nice guy, and I’m glad that he has kept M59 going strong after 14 years (launched in late 1995, went public in 1996) and we wish him nothing but the best. However, this was an Everquest panel. The other three people you see at that table are/were EQ players. The subject was EQ and the focus was on game design elements of EQ. If Brian started a sentence with words other than “In my game, Meridian 59…” we are unaware of it. It was one of the more infamous (funny in retrospect) panels that we had ever run. Despite all of that, he did have some really good insights into game design that have since become part of the mainstream, more or less. Remember, back when we did this panel 4 years ago, WoW was the new kid on the block and wasn’t the monster MMO that it is today. We only had 3 WoW panels that year, as opposed to an entire day devoted to WoW this year.
Maybe later this week, I’ll post a “history in pictures” of the MMO track and you can see just how far we have come in 7 years, bearing in mind that we weren’t an official track at Dragon*Con until last year.
There hasn’t been a whole lot of DC*MMO activity this week. Our second podcast is in the can and will be posted any day now. We have started talking with Reakktor about having them present their upcoming game Black Prophecy, and we hope to have them on-board soon.
This week, we’ll be talking with Blizzard, 38 Studios, and Netdevil again in attempts to get them on board. We are also working on some events with our friends at Battle & Brew, a local gaming pub in Atlanta. We’ll be providing additional details on that in upcoming weeks.
Finally, we spoke with Funcom last week, and they have got a lot of plans for Dragon*Con this year. We are adding a Friday Night Party to the schedule, and they’ll be presenting panels on Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, and possibly a panel on their upcoming title as well. They will also be providing some prizes for our contests and live-action quest as well.
Now that Dragon*Con is only a couple more months away, we’ll be updating the site more frequently. Stay tuned.
Hi guys, sorry I missed last week, but life has been a bit chaotic at Casa de Grim.
Our schedule is starting to come together. NetDevil, makers of the upcoming release Jumpgate: Evolution, is very interested in attending Dragon*Con and we are working to confirm their participation for this year.
We have also received favorable response from 38 Studios, and they are looking to send some heavy hitters to Dragon*Con this year. I would say who, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise just yet.
We are also working on putting together our prize packages for all of our various contests and games. I don’t think you guys will be disappointed.
The podcast will be out later this week. Krystalle has one hell of an editing job ahead of her if she plans on making me sound halfway decent.
For the latest and greatest information, check the podcast as we have scattered all kinds of interesting tidbits for your enjoyment.
