And every mount has it’s own way of looking faster or slower. I was surprised to see that the Ram looks a bit faster than the cat mount (at least to me). Anyone ever really run a race with all these?

In any case, it was fun getting a cross-race mount. I’ll only worry about rep now to save money on learning spells and such for when I hit the higher levels.

Original Posted Reply:

There is a system of measurement the game system uses for AOE spells and ranged weapons. The game knows and keeps track of how far your character is from everything, creatures (calculating agro per character’s level), rocks, plants, deadly high ledges, anything and everything in the game and it loads this data into native memory when you load the game so everything is pre-calculated. That’s why WOW’s physics engine is tops.

There are addons that naturally use the information in the physics engine of the game that pop that info up as a heads up display, namely Quest Helper and Carbonite. Both of these addons give you distances to quest items or locations. Using one of these, you can measure the distance between two points in the game and then lay a map image onto Google earth with real world measurements and viola, you have a basic estimate of how big everything is.

There’s a basic estimate that has been discussed; The eastern kingdom is a little better than 9 miles from north to south, slightly larger than Manhattan. I would have to say it’s actually slightly smaller than that. I measured the distance between Orgrimar and Razor Hill using one of the addons I mentioned, taking this measurement into account, I laid a map of Durotar on the globe in Google earth, used the path measurement tool and I came up with a size that is representative of Durotar based on that measurement, scaling durotar until it matched. I then overlaid and matched up the entire continent of Kalimdor with the correctly sized Durotar. Then finally, I laid the entire world map over this and I got a global representation of the entire known world of Azeroth. I used miles initially, but since they use yards in the game, I converted to Kilometers and this is what I got:

Kalimdor – 12.40 K by 6.40 K
Distance to Eastern Kingdoms – 7.40 K
Eastern Kingdoms (including the Blood Elf area) – 14.25 K by 5.25 K

Teldrassil – 1.75 K in diameter

Bloodmyst Isle 1 K by .95 K

Azuremyst Isle 1.07 K

There has been some modification to the map with the new expansion, the Frozen Throne coming out. I did the overlay with the newest map courtesy of WOWWiki and got the measurements for Northrend.

Northrend – 8.15 K by 6.85 K

When I finish the google eart overlay and make it look nice, I’ll post it somewhere.

Cheers

Additional info:

Taking the data from http://www.warcraftrealms.com on population of servers, ratios of Alliance to Horde, and race, I’ve compiled the following -

The server on which I currently play has a population of 36,859 players as of 9/24/08 at 3:12 pm.
The Ratio of Horde to Alliance is a 1:1.7 in favor of Alliance (no accounting for taste but I digress).
Racial percentages are varied with Humans and Night Elves at 19% each, Blood Elves at 13%, Draenei at 12%, and all others at 8% or less. Hunters make up the majority of the classes with 15%, followed by mages at 12% and others between 11 to 9%.

If you take the area of the land masses, add them together and convert to square miles, the population density of Azeroth on this server at this time with these players is roughly 277.87 players per square mile. Taking this into account and comparing it to war torn areas like, um, I don’t know… IRAQ? We can postulate how many Horde it would take to Hold Ironforge and if it’d even be possible given the numbers of players on each side and spawn rates of the NPCs which I didn’t even calculate into any of this.

In a nut shell, it’s not logical to think of “holding” and area or having any kind of real war in Azeroth but it has nothing to do with square miles. It is not tru that there is always someone better. If you take a forsaken mage against a human mage, spec them the same, give them the same gear, it would be like playing tick tac toe. There would be a fifty fifty shot unless one person has faster fingers. At any rate, it wouldn’t be fun. If you notice, the level cap keeps going up and the reason for that is to create an adversarial atmosphere… it’s about getting better, not getting even.

I conclude with this… does it matter how big the world is or how many people are in it? Would it stop any of us from playing to know that Durotar is not much bigger than my neighborhood? NO! We play because we enjoy the virtual interaction and earning fake gold and pwning noobs, do we not?