Blizzard front office sign in Versailles, Paris

Even if the US community is used with this kind of event, for us, here in EU, this was the very first edition for the Blizzard Fansite Summit. We, wowjuju.com, were very lucky to be invited and I'd like to tell you all about the day I spent in Paris, at Blizzard headquarters.

We received the invitation like three weeks ago and the Summit took place on 22 of June 2012. The time spent on the road was pretty boring and nothing worth mentioning about happed. At least not for me, the wowjuju.com representative.

On June 22nd, at 9:00 in the morning we all meet in front of the hotel. There were about 15 fansites representatives there: Manaflask, Gosugamers, Wowjuju, Buffed, InGame, Gamona, JudgeHype, Millenium, GamersOrigin, WoWSfera, Diablo 3 ESP, Battlecraft, Battlenet.pl, Warcry and D3expert.
I really hope I didn't forget anyone and got every website right.

After a little misunderstanding with some taxi company, we managed to arrive at the Blizzard HQ. Blizzard employees were the ones taking us there, because taxi drivers are over rated in Paris I guess

Blizzard Paris Office
After we saw their awesome underground parking lot (just kidding, nothing to see there) we went up into the lobby for the badges distribution and to sign the NDA papers.

Their building is really new and there are still things to be finished. Everything looks great and having a Stormwind and Orgrimmar office is really something All the offices and meeting rooms have game-related names. That's a pretty interesting concept.

We were not allowed to take pictures in most of the areas, but we didn't left empty handed. The inner courtyard has a great statue:

The Queen of Blades statue - Blizzard Europe Office

And their lobby looks like this:

The Summit
Obviously, there are things that we are not supposed to tell you about, and we wont. Simple as that.

All I can say is that the Summit was focused on the fansites and our relation with Blizzard.
Besides that, we came back with a lot of interesting ideas for the wowjuju community.

We attended three workshops, we meet the community team (Vaneras was missing though) in their office and we took a short tour of the building (parking lot included,woo-hoo). We also had some lunch breaks and we talked in between. We shared some gifts/goody-bags and I really hope they enjoyed my gift as much as I enjoyed theirs...

Our readers will benefit a little bit from my visit there also, because I have something for you too... but about that, a bit later. So stick around.

The after-party
When everything was over, we were invited to join some members of the Community Team for dinner in a nice French restaurant located in the center of Paris. The plan was to go to a bar to enjoy some drinks also and watch some Barcraft, after dinner. We did that, but it was already too late and there were a lot of people who had a plane to catch early in the morning, so we spent only a few minutes at that bar.

My only regret here is that no one from the Community Team wanted to tell us the Taxi Driver Joke. I guess this is the only minus of this meeting

Conclusion
I'd like to say tanks to Blizzard Community Team and the other fansites, that were preset at the event, for sharing their ideas, views and experience. From my point of view, the first EU Fansite Summit was a success and I really look forward to see how Blizzard felt about it.

Maybe you all read this and expected some hot announcements, but this time was not the case. Maybe in the future we will meet some developers and designers and we will be able to bring you more news.

I avoided to name the people I met there because I'm extremely bad with remembering names and I don't want to forget anyone.