BlizzCon 2010: Closing ceremonies
As BlizzCon 2010 comes to an end, Paul Sams (chief operating officer of Blizzard) started out the ceremonies. A series of intentionally bad gamer jokes followed as he got the crowd ready. He then took it to a serious note and thanked attendees both attending in person and at home.
Blizzard used this opportunity to bring out the tournament winners. Warcraft 3 winner Remind (night elf) from South Korea and StarCraft 2 winner NEXGenius (protoss), also from South Korea, were presented with $25,000 for being grand prize winners. They will also be getting an eSports ring customized to their game that's the size of Superbowl rings. The WoW Arena tournament was still going on at this point (*aAa* vs compLexity.Red), so there was no winner to announce for it yet.
Some faux-hype was built up as Paul started to hint that he was going to announce the secret next-gen MMO that Blizzard has had in development only to reveal a series of joke slides such as World of Jersey Shorecraft, Glee-ablo, and Booty Baywatch. So, still no news on that front. Based on interviews throughout the weekend we might not hear anything about it in 2011, but things should be announced by BlizzCon 2012.
The one big thing that did come out of the closing ceremonies was the announcement that 1,000 of the attendees will be receiving beta keys for Diablo 3. That's about 5% of the crowd that was at the convention. If you want to know how much of a chance this is, get a 20-sided die and take one attempt at rolling a 20. However, this does mean that the Diablo 3 beta is getting really close to being ready for testing.
All in all, I really feel that the closing ceremonies were phoned in. There were some cool moments and interesting features announced for all three major Blizzard properties this weekend, but the closing ceremony itself really left the convention feeling much more lackluster than it was.
On the bright side, Tenacious D is about to rock our socks off.
BlizzCon 2010 is upon us! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. We're bringing you liveblogging of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!
