WoW Insider

They mention in the article that they might use a lottery system to distribute tickets for BlizzCon 2009. I hope they do not implement this. I'd rather get my tickets because I get through to buy them. Oh well.

Actually the Lottery is intended to be a second chance for only those who had active account prior to the tickets being sold out. It's in fact a more fair shot than trying to be the fastest person...

The article in question states that Blizzard may use a lottery for the entire ticket pool next year though. That's what concerns me.

I have no problem if they do it half and half even... but making the entire pool of tickets a lottery is not cool.

Personally though, I'd rather see more cons. Or at least one on each coast. Assuming everyone isn't crazy enough to try and go to both of them, it would open up the experience for a lot more fans, especially those who can't make the trip to the other side of the country. Sadly, most of my guild falls into the "not enough time/money to fly from the East coast to CA" category.

Well, that, and at least one phobia of flying ;)

Yeah. Lets hope that this lottery isn't for each con and just a fair shot for those who were cheated out of a chance by sloppy web handling.

Cause yeah... then it become more of a contest than an actual event...

/agree
Lets do the math (math is fun!)

12,000 tickets for Blizz Con
10,000,000 ACTIVE WOW Accounts
5,000,000 (Conservative) Starcraft Players
5,000,000 (Conservative) Diablo Players

Lets De-dup and put the whole population at 12,000,000 (EXTREMELY conservative)

1% of 12,000,000 is 120,000 people. This is considered the 'fringe'.
12,000 is 0.1%. This could be considered the Lunatic Fringe.

It has been my experience that most marketing departments are heavy on 'creative' types and often very light on 'numerative' types. ;-) 'We didn't expect the volume...'

@Candina

The vast majority of WoW subscribers are overseas and not as likely to fly halfway around the world to Blizzcon though.

"World of Warcraft now hosts more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia."

Source: http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/080122.html

So, I'd say your final figure is not that conservative, considering the cost of airfare nowadays. They were still quite naive to not expect such demand though.

What are you talking about? This is linking to an article in the OC Register where the reporter is interviewing a Blizzard employee, not Mike Morhaime. He's not even mentioned in the article. I, for one, was very interested in hearing the specifics of what happened on Monday and Tuesday, especially that the store was up for a combined total of 15 minutes over the two day period.

What the hell? Please read before you flame....he's posting about an interview The OC Register conducted with the PR person from Blizzard.

The issue is one that has been brought up in many of Schramm's posts in the recent past; he nearly always posts information already posted by his fellow bloggers. Despite the information source his article quotes, all of the content his article elaborates upon has already been covered. Instead of being a fanboy, trying being objective and researching my points before you try to shoot them down.

Mike has a history of being the laziest blogger on this site in his reporting. That being said, maybe he has RL commitments that prevent him from checking in as much as he would like. I respect that but I certainly hope Dan Whitcomb pays attention to his readers as the editor of this site.

Dan, looking at the comments, do you really feel Mike deserves to be lead? Rossi does immeasurably better to the reader's eye. I'm not trying to be overly critical, but please. This guy makes it onto a cable network when he is arguably the most shallow writer on staff (outside of Moo - and her role is far different from Mike's).

So Tryst, L2Research.

"Wowinsider.com already reported on Mike Morhaime (sp?) apologizing and confirming that an additional 3000 tickets are going to be distributed by lottery."

Nowhere in Mike's article or in the OC Register article does it refer to Mike Morhaime's apology. Mike refers to the statement the Blizzard person makes in the article saying that BlizzCon 2009 tickets might be distributed via lottery and then he links to the other article about the 3000 BlizzCon 2008 tickets being sold by lottery. Linking in parenthesis is not reporting something as new. The "thesis statment" of your article is incorrect.

Mike summarized the article quite well. If Blizzard is repeating itself or is confirming suspicions that were posted on the forums that's not Mike's fault. Besides the article telling us that Mike Morhaime had apologized this is the only other source of information I've seen that comes straight from Blizzard.

I'm not going to waste my time researching whether or not someone is doing their job properly - unless I'm managing them, of course. I couldn't give a crap if Mike does a good job. If I don't like his article, I don't read it. I come here for info so I don't have to find it myself. BUT, I will throw down with you to research any other interesting topic out there. C'mon, let's see what ya got.

Statement from Mike Morhaime
Posted by: MikeM| 8-13-08

YAY FOR 2 DAY OLD INFO. TY SO MUCH FOR THIS!