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/a ... atos1.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/w ... rncont.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!

I couldn't tell you exactly what gave me this impression, but it seems like from reading the backstory on the WoW website, the world is supposed to be flat. This doesn't contradict anything in your post, it really just would confirm how wrong the goblin globe is.

There is also in-game evidence for thi: While the sun and moons move through the sky, the stars remain fixed relative to the ground. This would suggest that, rather than a round planet spinning in space, Azeroth is a flat surface underneath a dome of stars, with the sun and moons going back and forth between the two.
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Also, have you figured out a speed for normal unmounted running? I got exactly the same figure as you for a regular mount-with-carrot (right down to the thousandth of a yard per second). The apparent problem is with the fact that, when I run through the 30-yard range of some of my spells, it always takes about 4.75 seconds, wich would imply almost an 80% increase in running speed, rather than the 64.8% maximum possible increase suggested by having a mount and a carrot. (+60% for the mount, and then +3% of that total, which is already 160% running speed.)

Wow, hello to 14 months ago!

I'm the author of that news item. Interesting point that the world might be flat. I don't really know. I guess we don't have a mechanism to tell. I imagine that you're probably right, they probably didn't gradually curve the ground or ocean geometry.

And I never tried to measure normal run speed.

Azeroth is obviously a flat disc, riding on the back of a giant turtle, crawling through space. Stars are actually small objects in fixed positions just a few miles above and around the disc. The sun revolves around the entire turtle. If you were to reach the edge of the disc, you'd find that water simply pours over the edge into space.

this one time I fell through the world right into a bucket of lo mein noodles. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense: the air pockets between each noodle create a crisp, delicious azn pillow to break our falls. All this silly speculation isn't worth much when hard facts are available guys. GET YOUR HEAD OUT THE CLOUDS

Someone else verified this :

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2007/01/how ... eroth.html

and 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!

omg, you're e-famous!