I somehow managed to survive Blizzcon ’08 without my feet exploding from standing in lines for 3 days straight. I’ll say this for Blizzard – they put on one hell of a convention for their fans! The tickets were $100 each, but I think they we got half that back in the goody bag alone. A starter pack of the WoW collectible card game, an account authenticator, three different keychains, and a 4-foot-long inflatable sword among other things. Oh, and a minature bottle of hand-sanitizer. Precious, precious hand-sanitizer.

I’d normally think using hand-sanitizer when you’re not a health-care professional would be a little extreme. I didn’t think that after I sat down at one of the communal Diablo 3 PCs. This is not a joke, or an exaggeration: One of the people who sat at or near that terminal before me smelt like a backed-up toilet. When buying a few shirts from the store, I stood behind a man who smelled like stale urine.

Probably the highlight of the show was the closing ceremony. Patton Oswalt did infact appear to do a show, and I hope some of it appears in his CD coming out next year. The in-house Blizzard band, Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftan played 4 or 5 songs. For those of you not familiar with them, L70etc is a heavy-metal band made up of Blizzard employees, including the Art Director on vocals and the president of the company on Bass. Closing out the night was Videogames Live playing selections from various Blizzard games.

Unfortunately, I missed most of the section on Friday night hosted by Jay Mohr. I’d really liked to have seen the costume contest. Check out the winner. That turtle is not a dude in a costume.

I did get to see the Dance contest, though. Here’s the winner of that:

According to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft launcher, this week marks the third year since WoW launched. How did you celebrate? I celebrated by canceling my account!

I took a 5 month break from the game around this time last year, so I guess I missed out on all the two year celebrations. Before I left the game that time, I had been involved in the raiding scene for several months. My guild, Synergy, had just become the third guild on our server to defeat the last boss of Ahn’Qiraj, an Old God named C’Thun, and I decided that this was a significant enough milestone that I should take break for a while.

I started playing again when the Burning Crusade expansion came out in January, and I played casually over the summer with a group of like-minded people going under the hilarious guildname “My Guild is Fight”. Unfortunately, MGIF recently disbanded due to people leaving and in general us not having sufficient numbers to tackle some of the harder dungeons in the game. However, an old friend from Synergy got in contact with me to offer a raid slot in his new guild, the #2 guild on the server. Seeing as how the guild was made up of a bunch of people I knew from Synergy, I jumped at the chance. Not only were they playing together in the high-end dungeons with all the best boss fights, they were also a group of really excellent players. Unfortunately, joining them overlapped almost completely with an extended crunch period on my current project at work, and I ended up only being able to play with the new guild a couple of times in a two-week span. What made this worse was that the people in this new guild were bending over backwards during this period to rearrange their playtimes in order to get my character set up to handle the dungeons they raid in. I don’t really like to be a charity case in a guild, nor do I like to feel like I’m inconveniencing 24 people every time I have to work late.

I was beginning to think that rather than rearrange my schedule, I should just go back to playing casually. But then, the 3 year anniversary notice came up and I thought “You know what? 3 years (give or take half a year) is plenty of time to have spent with this game.” So I let the new guild know I’d no longer be playing, and I canceled my account.

I know a couple of people who are probably horrified to read how much time I spent with WoW. And yes, 3 years is a lot of time to play one game. But, if I hadn’t been playing WoW, I would have been playing some other game(s). I made some good friends, and I met some interesting people (although not as many as one of my RL friends that I played with).

This year, and in particular this season, is probably the perfect time to have quit WoW. The list of absolutely amazing A++ games that are out for this Christmas is staggering. That said, I’m getting a little annoyed at all the people saying “It’s a great time to be a gamer!” Stop saying that, please. It makes you sound like an idiot.

So, to celebrate 3 years of WoW, I cancelled my account and went to see Enchanted with my girlfriend after work. And that was really nice.

What’s all this? It appears suspicious.

I am right to be suspicious. This appears to be the World of Warcraft Burning Crusade Collector’s Edition. How did it get in my house? Puzzling…