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!