#1 - June 25, 2009, 10:08 p.m.
It's Thursday and the Blizzard team has arrived in Cologne. The hotel, housing both Blizzard staff and pro-gamers, is literally a 2 minute walk away from the venue. A good thing, mind you, because the sun has been shining all day, probably leaving many a person who dared to enter the great outdoors for more than a few hours with a sunburn if they were unlucky.
Enter the venue. What a sight! The event is set up spanning over three different floors; the main stage being the first thing you see when you enter. Downstairs you can find a free gaming area with computers containing both World of Warcraft and StarCraft II for both attendees, players, and visitors to enjoy. Truly a remarkable sight as there is branding everywhere you go. One can feel the "Blizzard essence" everywhere; something that is quite obivously putting a huge smile on everyone here.
Upstairs, the press room has been set up with internet enabled computers for press to work from. Across the hallway are both the relaxation room for the pro-gamers, as well as the pro-gamer player area housing a large number of "beasty" machines to play on.
We can almost feel the excitement in the air, and the event has not even started yet!
In a little more than 12 hours from the time of writing, this venue will be filled with players, press, and visitors all here for one thing: The EU and US 2009 Regional Finals in World of Warcraft and Warcraft 3. The good news for all of you is the fact that there will be a live stream from the venue, covering matches from both games. You can find more information on the stream and the tournament on our 2009 Regional Finals pages here:
http://eu.blizzard.com/rf09/index.xml
In addition to our website coverage on the pages listed above, we will be providing live up-to-date coverage here on our very own community forums. Each day, we will be creating one forum thread and providing coverage, commentary, and perhaps a few responses to questions that might pop up over the days. Be sure to stay tuned and keep hitting that refresh button.
With that, dear community, we bid you farewell on this Thursday evening. We will rejoin you tomorrow with more updates, more commentary and more competitive talk in this thread:
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=9520949810&sid=1
