For those of you unaware, this here troll mage is a Canadian fellow. Born here, raised here, love it here.
Why do I tell you this? Because of this rather trippy thing having to do with the Arena Tournaments that Blizzard is hosting.
Arena Tournament Registration
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY FOR CANADIAN RESIDENTS
Canadian residents are not required to pay an Entry Fee in order to enter. Instead, Canadian residents may enter by submitting a 250 word typewritten essay comparing the video gaming culture in Canada to the video gaming culture in the United States on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper and mailing their essay to Essay Entry for The North American Blizzard Entertainment Arena Tournament, P.O Box 18979, Irvine, CA 92623. Essay entries must be received no later than March 31, 2008 in order to be eligible. Essay entrants represent and warrant that the essay is their original work and does not infringe the rights of any third party. By entering, essay entrants hereby grant, without further consideration, all right, title and interest in and to their essay to Sponsor.
I know you’re thinking “Wait, what?”
Canadian law is a very bitchy thing to try and work with. Last year, when Blizzard held these official Arena Tournament business, they had to close it to Canadian residents. Essentially, Canadian gaming law prevents any Canadian resident from competing in any gaming event UNLESS said gaming event has intelligent or educational aspects to them. And because it’s educational, they cannot charge for it either.
HENCE.
We Canadians can enter the arena tournament, or could if we mailed off our 250 word introduction paragraph… I mean, essay, to Blizzard a few weeks ago.
And here in Quebec, we have an even more stupid law where 5 % the value of the final prize(s) must be given to “loto-quebec” (this amount serves them to “protect” us from fraudulent contest they say).
Since Blizz their right mind won’t pay that, we here cannnot take part in the contest once again. (I won’t blame blizz for that, stupid laws FTL)
WooT! I love Canada!
I WONDERED wtf was up with the essay thing.
Since I’m not a serious arena player, I’ll never pay $20 to play on the tournament realm…
I would definately jump on the chance if I were able to get in by sneezing at a piece of paper, though.
Here’s the truly funny thing… you wrote 140 words. With your quoted text, it’s up to 280. And I’m guessing it took you all of 10 minutes to write. Good for you; sux for all the Americans out there. Then again… $20 for 10 minutes of work… that’s $120 per hour! Wow… Blizzard pays really well. rofl.
Seven, actually.
And that includes the time it took to log into wordpress, wait for the load, copy and paste the text from the site…
It was a lot of work.
I work for an independent judging organization in the U.S., which administers various contests and sweepstakes for clients ranging from Microsoft to Starbucks to YouTube. I’m a programmer, not an administrator, so I don’t know the exact specifics, but apparently whenever a Canadian resident wins a prize in any of the random drawings, they must solve a relatively simple math equation before receiving the prize – Canadian law apparently prevents its residents from winning totally random contests, and by having to solve the equation, the random drawing can now be considered skill-based.