There is much to be said for a three-day gaming tournament, especially one involving the wonderful World of Warcraft. Amid a backdrop of comic book, anime, and horror (all at the Toronto Convention Centre to take part in FaxExpo ’07) teams from around the world battled it out on stage for WSVG points on the path to being crowed this year’s WoW 3v3 pvp world champion (try saying that three times fast!)

I would love to not to start my review of the weekend’s events on a sour note, however, there are a few things I was very disappointed in. The first was the lack of press assistance that the WSVG offered to anyone coving the show. Anyone running a tournament might thing to prepare a press package including things like match times, interview schedules, photo ops and the like. Instead I received a copy of this year’s FanExpo official program. As for a list of match times, the closest I could find was on page 37 buried amongst the listing of everything else the WSVG was offering over the weekend (sans match times, teams involved, etc.) My second complaint is that there were no announcements about the WoW competition whatsoever. Introductions of teams, play commentary, standings, score, and the like were non-existant for WoW gamers (but superb for the Guitar Hero II competition). Finally, with the exception of on fast scrolling monitors (covering both Quake and WoW) or online (no longer up) there was nothing to indicate who was moving onto the next round and who was going home. *Whew*… With that out of the way, onto the rest of the review!

The setup for the competition itself was very well put together. Six computers, three to a side, were placed on the stage where the competition took place. Okay, this sounds like it should be a given, but check out the pictures – the presentation came together well in my opinion. Flat screen TVs were set up on the platform which gave alternating views of the players and the game in real time. The players were given a prep-time before each match (of an unknown length… It seemed to me that they did an awful lot of nothing for an awful lot of time) but once the match finally got going the stage became an exciting mixture of cameramen, players sitting at computers, and their team mates running back and forth to check on their status.

Unfortunately that pretty much wraps up my coverage of the actual WSVG aspect of the tournament. Having no sort of match schedule, interview or photo-op sessions (I was told that I would be asked to leave if I approached the players directly) there really was not a lot for me to report on. I didn’t even know there was a player scandal until today (a team used a non-sanctioned pet during a semi-final round match, which was then replayed… Needless to say a good deal of people are very upset about it). I missed out on the final match because there was no one on the stage at the scheduled time, no notifications about whether it had been done earlier or was still to come, and I did not even know the winner of the competition (Team Pandemic, having now won every WoW WSVG event this season) until I read about it later that night. The weekend was not a total waster, however. I spent most of my free time wandering around FanExpo enjoying the sights and sounds – and yes, finding some pretty cool things involving the World of Warcraft, including one very well dressed female Blood Elf who was watching the events.

Over at the Silver Snail booth they had an exclusive look at four new WoW action figures (sadly only a few of my pictures turned out well enough to post… Thwarted by plastic again!)

A few meters off to the side of the Quake 4 stage was an entire row of new Intel desktops all running WoW for the enjoyment of anyone lucky enough to grab a seat.

For those not wanting to wrestle others for a computer, Intel had a compliment of laptops set up across from the WoW WSVG stage. Show casing their new chip technology these machines were AMAZING! Naturally I had to check them out! An Intel Core 2 extreme quadcore processor (2.66 Ghz) with 4Gb of DDR ram, an Nvidia Gefore 7950 and a Gigabit LAN subsystem using an Intel 82573E Gigabit ethernet controller sure as heck beats playing WoW on my Acer Aspire 5000… Maybe it was playing the game on a machine that doesn’t have a built in graphics card that excited me but man was it smooth!

Overall the weekend was not entirely how I imagined it might had been (especially when I realised that despite having their economic baby being showcased, Blizzard was nowhere to be found), however, it was a great experience and one that I am looking forward to attending next year. (So long as our new Lead Editor Eldorian hasn’t fired me by then for being late with my write ups… Sorry!) -E