It has taken me a while to come up with a noteworthy response to Tobold’s excellent post on How big is Azeroth, but I have finally done it. Actually, it only took me 2 minutes to think it, but much longer to compose it into something deserving of my fine readership’s eyes.
To quote some of Tobold’s experiment:
So what I did was run from the east end of Thousand Needles to the west coast of Feralas, because you can do so in pretty much a straight line. I timed it, and crossing the width of the continent of Kalimdor running took me 18 minutes and 35 seconds. That makes the distance 3.7 miles. That means the continent of Kalimdor is 41 square miles (just over 100 square kilometers) big, and the world of Azeroth pre-Burning Crusade is about 80 square miles or 200 square kilometers.
I have my own answer to my own question about the size of Azeroth: Is Azeroth Big? Now that we know how big it is, does that qualify as big. I can never seem to make anything simple, so I have two answers to this, as I do most things that I can come up with multiple sides.
First is, Azeroth is HUGE! There is no way one person or even guild can dominate the whole virtual world. If there were real world dynamics going on and the Horde and Alliance were actually going at it all the time in a war, the war would go on forever. Neither side could beat the other into submission because it is just too big. A guild could dominate a zone, or a player can dominate a battleground, but just as in real life, someone is always better than you. Eventually someone will get better gear or better tactics or better support personnel and wipe your butt for you.
Second, Azeroth is a tiny little drop in the bucket. Just doing the comparison to the world, Manhattan is not a very big piece of land on the planet, much less compared to Texas. People, such as Loius and Clark and Napoleon have explored far greater areas of the world than Azeroth offers. If exploration is the measure, then Blizzard has fallen far short of Creation itself. Someone can explore every nook and cranny of Azeroth in under 10 days of running around or riding a horse, yet the great explorers have taken much longer for our benefit.
So, which of me is right?
Here’s my take on it (also posted on the orginal link).
Okay.. if you are to take 18 minutes and 37 seconds to travel from a to b, and as you say thats 3.7 miles, then the runner had to be running at an amazing speed of 1 mile every 4.864 minutes.
To put that into perspective the mile record is held by Hicham El Guerrouj, who set a time of 3 minutes 43.13 seconds in Rome in 1999.
Now, a pace such as that is only sustainable for more than 1 mile.
To be more accurate, in comparing your hero’s you’d be better off using a more realistic target than a marathon running who runs in just a running outfit.
My gut tells me that a soldier (I was one) in full battle gear with his guerney (backpack), weapon etc.. After all well trained soldiers are full time athletes due to training almost everyday.
Remember, our heros are running in full armor, with weapons and multiple bags of goods.
No soldier could run a five minute mile with a 30+ kilo backpack, kevlar helmet, boots, rifle, ammunition, water, combat fatigues on. The best speed you could expect them to do would be a forced speed march which might give you a speed in the region of the 11 – 12 minute mile. Bear in mind that would be only be achievable over good terrain such as a road and for not much more than 5 – 10 miles or the soldiers will be to fatigued to be effective in combat. Longer distance (20 – 40 miles) are regularly marched but a slower speeds to avoid excessive fatigue.
Even running with little more than their weapon soldiers will rarely do above a 7:30 to 8 minute mile, and this will only be sustained over very short distances after reaching the battle area dumping their heavy equipment so they can move into combat. Again, a fatigued soldier can’t fight properly or shoot straight.
Finally you have to consider terrain. The minute record, and the speeds I take about above are in near perfect conditions.
Our heros in Azeroth move at the same pace regardless of terrain, but in the real world I’ve marched over terrain where it took us from 30 minutes, to an hour and upwards to cover a kilometer, let alone a mile.
So when it comes to Azeroth, as we clearly can’t take the speed of the heros as being even reasonably close to reality, and distances between town-lands are therefore impossible to judge with any degree of accuracy the answer is that Azeroth is as big as your imagination!
I agree that my measurement is imprecise if you measure “big” on a scale of meters. But it is precise if you measure it in minutes. If you can cross Kalimdor on foot in less than 20 minutes, than on an epic mount its just 10 minutes wide, 30 minutes long. It takes a long time to visit every corner, but even without using any form of teleportation no two points of the World of Warcraft are more than 1 hour travel from each other.
Welcome back Tobold!
I stand by Tobold on the time measurement, as that is how the game is played. It is also played with the idea of conquest and control, as in a BG. BGs are not big for a reason: it would be unreasonable for a group to control too large of an area. AV is already about as big as you want, but minute in the scope of the entire game.
Why don’t you just measure it in a smarter way when you have the tools? A mage with ‘blink’ does 20 yd. Blink a few times and you quickly go from guesstimate to an estimate.
1. Because I don’t have a mage.
2. I don’t really care how big it “really” is. My part in this was philosophical. Ask Tobold why he didn’t do that.
-Apathetic Author
I posted this in reply to the artical above at Tobold’s Blog, but I’ve added some info on population density with regards to warfare and “holding areas”.
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?