After agonising over it quite a bit, I’ve decided I won’t be getting the Blizzcon live stream this year.

I really wanted to do it so that I could post any druid-related news as it is relayed, and without relying on sites like MMO and wow.com to post transcripts to copy/paste.

(It’s not the end of the world, I just wanted to be able to do it myself, not just re-post the other sites’ news.)

There are a few reasons why I decided not to do it:

  • I’m working hard towards my RL goal of buying a house, and $50 counts!

  • The panels I want to see are at 6:30am on Saturday and Sunday for me. That’s not a huge deal, I’ve been up early for WoW commitments before, but it’s still a factor. If I wanted to post things as we hear about them, I’d have to be up really early to catch the panels (I don’t care about the archives/replay).

  • There’s no guarantee that they won’t cut to random stuff like behind-the-scenes or interviews, meaning the few segments I want to see may be cut short. I would be very cranky if they cut to stuff I didn’t care about. Lots of people have asked about this, but no answers have been given by Blizzard, and if it’s the case, I think that’s pretty crappy, to be honest. If people are paying $40 ($50 here) they should be able to choose which “channel” (stage) they want to watch. It’s not difficult to do.

  • Australian internet isn’t the greatest, and I live in a rural area, making it worse. There’s a very good chance it will be very poor quality – especially if my connection forced me to use the low-def version. I guess I should be grateful that I have internet – but boy is it suck compared to a lot of other countries! Australia really needs to get its A into G, as we say here. Give us better internets!


So all up I would be paying $50 for poorly streamed (due to my connection) video, at 6:30am on Saturday and Sunday, and the coverage may not stay focused on the 3 panels I want to watch, anyway. I really wanted to catch the news live, but I can’t justify $50 for about 3 hours of panels that could be cut short and may well be very low quality due to my backwater internet.

So I’ll just have to suck it up and deal with compiling druid info from the main sites. It’s disappointing to me – I would rather be posting it first-hand, but it’s not the end of the world.

To everyone on their way to the con itself – have a blast! Wish I could be there with you!



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