It's a small world

Athlithuil points out that the Azeroth we know is severely scaled down, so there's lots of room for locations for roleplaying stories.

As always, I'm two minds about it. On the other hand, I am for promoting realism, not being constrained by game mechanics and thus improving immersion. But on the other hand, I am against taking too much liberties with the lore. It can easily lead to a bunch of player-made retcons whenever a new RPG book or a novel is published. And there is always the temptation of godmodding and making yourself a bigwig of some imaginary village.

The Azeroth we know is a miniature version of the true Azeroth. Even traveling between zones would take days. In "Day of the Dragon", it takes days to fly from Southshore to Wetlands. The in-game flight is five minutes at most. This miniaturization is necessary to keep the game interesting with the current amount of content. We'd need a lot of semi-randomly generated filler content, like in Oblivion. But Oblivion also has a time-accelerating autotravel to keep players from getting bored when they do not want to explore all of this fluff. That can't be done in an MMORPG. So players need to imagine all of this. Imagine if just getting to an instance took 45 minutes or more. Imagine if just moving a PvP raid to the location took hours instead of 30 minutes. Miniaturization is necessary to keep the game interesting.