You spend a lot of time in Azeroth, you should know some stuff about the world! First, according to this globe in Booty Bay, Azeroth is a planet with only the two continents that we know and love.
Now, lets talk size. How big is Azeroth? The best way to estimate it would be something like this http://outreach.as.utexas.edu/marykay/assignments/eratos1.html I didn't actually try this method because I have a feeling solar time is the same everywhere in Azeroth. Does the sun set earlier in Tarren Mills than Barrensl? It should, but I doubt it does by any appreciable amount. In fact, according to the globe in Booty Bay, time of day should be pretty much opposite on the two continents Conclusion: the globe is horribly wrong, the planet is massively larger than shown. So how else can we estimate the size of Azeroth? Direct measurement. I can run a tape measurer behind my wolf as I cross a continent! But they don't make tape measurers. So I did this-Step 1- find a large, scale map of Lorderon. http://www.worldofwar.net/cartography/worldmap/easterncont.php is a good one. I assume everything is properly scaled. Step 2- estimate run speed. To do this we need a fixed distance to measure travel time across. But I couldn't find any track and field stadiums in Azeroth. So instead I used the fact that entities magically poof once you are 100 yards away from them. I carefully found the exact spot where I could back up to and cause an NPC to poof. I assumed it was 100 yards from there to him. I ran and measured the time. 8.75 seconds to cover 100 yards on my wolf. Wolf speed, with carrot, is approximately 11.428 yards per second. Pretty fast. Step 3- run a longer distance so that I can find out how many pixels on that map I am moving per second. Or, equivalently, how large a distance each pixel represents. I ran from the Stead to the Lake in Eastern Plaguelands in about 96 seconds (101, actually, but it wasn't exactly straight and i had to dodge a couple NPCs). So it was 1096 yards from the stead to the lake. that was about 125 pixels on the map. So each pixel is 8.768 yards squared. How many pixels from top to bottom? It's 1808 pixels from Strathmore to Booty Bay (vertical component only). This comes to 9.007 Miles So here is Lorderon next to Manhatten.
*obviously, all sorts of measurement error could have conspired to make this off by 25% or more. Our next lesson will be on the crazy weather systems of Azeroth. No rain, but huge jungles! Transitions from jungle to desert in 20 feet! Craziness!
Someone else verified this :http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-big-is-azeroth.htmland gave me credit for doing it first.And recently this video has been making the rounds of the Internet:http://www.viddler.com/explore/rooreynolds/videos/26/Which frankly seems to rip off a bit of my original work without citation!
I'm using this to illustrate why multiple cities/shards are a bad idea based on standard MMOG design. Namely because they'd be too small!
Unless the game world is mostly empty space, like Eve, the game's probably going to need multiple servers/shards/game worlds to keep the player density from becoming over-saturated
Quote from: Mir on December 10, 2010, 03:02:49 amUnless the game world is mostly empty space, like Eve, the game's probably going to need multiple servers/shards/game worlds to keep the player density from becoming over-saturatedI highly doubt that. One good-sized city would be enough for everyone. I expect we'd only have a few tens of thousands of players at launch, maybe a couple hundred thousand, but those are the kinds of numbers that can easily fit into a single city.
Building multiple cities would be a disservice to the customers.
The problem is that, as far as we know, the players are, by and large, going to be Vampires (and as the game expands post-launch, probably other supernaturals). A hundred thousand Vampires in a single city is a bit excessive. Multiple large cities could work (if they actually have the resources to create a game world that big), or having a one-city world with multiple servers, with the more typical server population of 2-5K, could also keep the mortal-to-supernatural ratio looking right. I personally think the multi-server option is more feasible.