long story short:
Enjoy this amazing world while you can. (Though, it might not be a bad idea to take a few minutes away from game to learn how to grow your own food, field dress wild game and take a couple of self defense classes.)
Long story long:
Let's compare those numbers to the world we play in - World of Warcraft has around 11 -12 million subscribers (if you count alts, I wonder how many characters are out there, I mean, each subscriber can make up to 50 characters.) We are fortunate that new realms, new copies of the same world, can be created.
So, the more important numbers to look at with World of Warcraft are the carrying capacities for the individual realms, since each one represents a whole and complete version of Azeroth. (I am not going to look at Horde/Alliance ratios since the real determiner if a ream is "full" is overall number of characters.) After doing some digging the "high" population realms all start with a little over 20k population but can get up to 40k. (I'm comparing WarcraftRealms.com to the Battle.net Realm Status page to determine the "high" pop realms and their actual population.) So we can say the "full" realms are the upper end of that scale, let's say 35K+. Thus, the carrying capacity for any single version of Azeroth is (very roughly) 35k population.
To bring it home:
- the Earth has 7 billion people. (unfortunately, we don't have the ability to say "Sorry, the earth is full, find another world to live on.")
- Azeroth's carrying capacity as determined by queue times, and by Blizzard itself, seems to be 35k+ pop.
-If everyone on the planet played WOW, and not one of them made an alt, Blizzard would need about 200,000 realms. Or, seen another way, supposing 7 billion is Earth's carrying capacity (and the coming apocalypse will prove me right on this one) then Azeroth is 1/2000,000 the size of Earth. So total surface area of Azeroth should be about 2,550km2 with about 745 km2 of that being land mass.
Saddly, these numbers don't coincide with the work put in by a far more precise player then myself. Here you can find an awesome article (noob World Reorder) on Azeroth that looks at the world in amazingly scientific terms.
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One problem inherent in my calculations is that realm population is determined by characters, not actually number of players or accounts. Depending on how many alts a person has, the number of actual people on at one time, interacting with the world, could be a decent percentage less than that 40k number. And that kind of skews what I'm trying to show here. Conversely, every human isn't up and active at the same time. Atls not being used are seen as "resting."
well...
I works with what I gots.
Banya - one in 7 billion.