WoW - Burning Crusade Launch

I just got back from the launch of Burning Crusade at Suntec. I think it was a really lousy launch for such a popular game. Asiasoft should fire their events management company or Blizzard should fire Asiasoft for making such a mess out of the launch.













Firstly, hundreds of people turned up for the launch. I know WoW is popular but I admit I was surprised at the number of people who turned up for the launch. What you see in the first pic is probably just 1/3 of the crowd! The others snaked all the way out of suntec towards Millenia Walk. Why was the launch such a failure? It can be broken down into three reasons.

1. Utter disrespect for the intelligence of WoW players. They actually used a low-class amatuerish MAGIC SHOW for the launch!! In the second pic, they had a pseudo-hot babe come up with some stupid mask and start swinging two little fireballs! And she was so amatuerish she almost hurt herself at the end! (Though it would probably had been more interesting if she had hurt herself.)

Then they had this guy dressed in some stoopid alliance-looking paper armour come up waving a wand and then shooting out some sparklers! OMG! Did they think we were 4-year olds?!! Then the girl comes out again swinging some sword like an ultra-noob. Then they attempt a magic trick! The Fake-Armour-Guy (ie. FAG) puts some contraption around his neck and the girl inserts the flexible sword into the contraption... Ooooooooooooh! So magical! NOT!

Then the FAG received a 'quest' from some big shot from Asiasoft and then proceeds to put a little preorder card into a supposedly glass case. Then he covers the case with a cloth and when he removes it... VOILA!!! A ULTRA-BIG EMPTY BURNING CRUSADE BOX!!! So exciting!!! Confetti guns go off! And Glenn Ong makes a fool of himself. Sigh.











2. Totally inefficiency of the event staff. You have hundreds of people at the launch. A pretty successful launch if you asked me. They had a huge long counter (as you can see in the last picture). Wanna guess how many groups of people were doing the exchange of the pre-order cards for the game? ONE! ONE FRICKING GROUP! And they had other staff either standing around or wheeling in new stocks... yeah.. you have a mountain of boxes of WoW, but what's the point when you only have one exchange counter! The queue moved so slowly and I just could not believe that no one took the initiative to organize the people into more exchange counters.













3. Lousy event planning skills. Can you imagine having such a huge event and having no instructions anywhere? I was quite keen to see what this Onyxia's Challenge and dunno what Wheel of something was about but guess what, there were no instructions anywhere! So no one knew what to do with whatever they got. I received two cards with plenty of icons and two sheets of stickers. Uh.. SO WHAT!? There weren't even any instructions on the cards. I looked around, went near the wheel and the Onyxia board... nothing! Wonderful. Makes you want to take the cards and stuff them down the throats of the organizers (and Glenn Ong, who was a lousy emcee).

I couldn't believe how hopeless the whole situation was. I decided to go off to Funan for a walk and returned about 1.5 hours later. And guess what... there was still only ONE counter. Well, thankfully the queue was a little shorter so after about 30mins, I finally got my hands on the new Burning Crusade.

It's quite an irony. On one hand, it's great to see a launch event like this in Singapore. Really shows that we are becoming a little more savvy when it comes to product launches. But when you see how poorly the whole thing was put together, I kinda wished all they had were a row of counters to efficiently exchange the cards for the games instead of all the embarassing festivities.

Nintendo Wii is supposed to be launched in Singapore soon. Hope they do a much better job than this.