Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a three-part musical web series written and directed by Joss Whedon during the writer's strike, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion. If you haven't seen it yet, shame on you.
This morning, I set out to answer some burning questions I had about the scale of our in-game world. Because that's how I play the game now: I log in, admire the scenery for a while, take a few measurements, maybe give a training dummy a piece of my mind, then admire the scenery again. And I'm okay with that. This won't be a technical article at all - more of a list of "fun facts".
Fun fact #1: The sun also rises.
-Azeroth's sun travels in an arc across the sky (as do its two moons). Sort of. Around 5:30a (server time), the sun rises on the northwest horizon. Sometime around midday, it apparently reverses direction and begins travelling back towards the northwest. I have no idea why this happens, and if it is not a bug, either Azeroth or its sun has an oscillating, rather than constant, angular velocity.
Fun fact #2: Your character has terrible peripheral vision.
-WoW has a horizontal field of view of around 85 degrees on my 16:9 monitor, meaning that when you zoom in to a first person point of view (camera inside the character's head), you can see everything within 42.5 degrees to the left or right of your line of sight without moving the camera. While this sounds impressive, humans have roughly double that horizontal field of view. Try holding an 8.5x11" piece of paper one foot away from your face. Your character can't see anything beyond the left and right borders of that paper.
Fun fact #3: Your character is much faster than you.
-Rogues sprint at 170% normal run speed: 11.9 yd/s or 24.3 mph. Usain Bolt holds the current world record 100 meter dash, with an average speed at 23.3 mph. To be fair, a rogue's sprint ability lasts only 8 seconds, for a maximum of 87 meters.
-Standard run speed in WoW is 7 yards per second, or 14.3 mph, and characters can run indefinitely. The world record average speed for a marathon (26.2 miles) is 12.5 mph. Oh, and speaking of marathons...
Fun fact #4: Azeroth is smaller than you think.
-A real-life marathon spans roughly twice the distance between Silvermoon City (the northern tip of Eastern Kingdoms) and the Cape of Stranglethorn in the south. I've estimated the length of Eastern Kingdoms (not including the Isle of Quel'Danas) to be ~13.3 miles. To put that in perspective, here's a to-scale comparison of the explorable portion of Azeroth and our smallest state, the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
Wait... does anybody else see that? Here, let me rearrange this for you.
Obviously I kid, but that whole Rhode Island thing is a fun coincidence, isn't it?
