They’ll also be ignoring the Night Elf NPC who has stood on their pier since 2004.
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Broadly agree, but this is exactly why scale is a problem.
If you look in-game, as you suggest, you’ll also see huge mage towers like 20ft away from these backwater farms, or giant portals to the Emerald Dream with a clear road going to them that are about a 2 minute walk away.
So actually…you kind of do? I mean yes you can see farmers and such that are not magically inclined and all of your examples are correct, but given the scale of zones presented in game it’s hard to believe these people have “no idea” about what an elf is or w/e, because these things are normally in super close proximity.
And to loop back to my original point - I think this is exactly the reason why it’s so consistently done badly in RP - because as people have pointed out, the examples of the actual scale are quite sparse (and very old, generally) and in-game is the primary source I’d assume most people use for RP, to be honest.
he’s a rogue though, clearly too stealthy to be spotted 
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Golden writing an incredibly tiny world again, I see.
Scale seems to be another thing in Warcraft lore that’s portrayed inconsistently and that Blizzard doesn’t care to definitely specify. Something something worldbuilding is for nerds, now go buy some cash shop mounts.
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Well, to that end - there’s barely a handful of non-Human NPCs to my knowledge in either Elwynn, Duskwood or Westfall (I guess there’s a Draenei Shaman in the latter off the top of my head and another Draenei in Darkshire). And then there’s Redridge where again, you have a total of two, a Dwarf and a Night Elf, both of whom are errant Rogues.
The contextual information is therefore conveyed that your average resident of those regions doesn’t regularly come into contact nor interact with Night Elves or Draenei. Nevermind that there’s probably not that much of a reason for those to come visit in general, outside of Stormwind itself.
This isn’t even going into Kul Tiras, which allows most foreigners access only in Tradewinds and not beyond it without proper documentation. And thus completely homogenous, with a few notable Dwarves and Gnomes present within Tiragarde.
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Tbf - serious and well regarded fantasy writers who really do care about their world building also have no sense of scale.
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Exactly why keeping things vague are the best idea. When on one end there’s trying to represent the world as it’s in-game, to the point of 40 soldiers being a force to be reckoned with (as if it’s an epic BG and not, well, war), and on the other it’s the big nothing the writers themselves don’t know what to do with, perhaps trying to avoid the absolute numbers and focusing on the relative scale of things would be the way to see things done.
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Meanwhile Tolkien who wrote an entire calendar appendice detailing what exactly happened on which day during the book, apparently all in the span of a year…
Though I do recall he did not really write “this place is this many km from here” but more went by day-journeys I believe.
There is a good argument for this in places, but in the context of WoW RP is it detrimental to not have agreed / canonized details.
For example, if we had a continent map of the EK, with a scale on it, that’d be that. As it stands currently, the answers you’ll get from people are just as inconsistent as the lore!
That said I do think some things which are not canon, like Lands of Conflict went a bit too far the other way, where they gave exact population and demographic breakdowns of towns / cities etc. (Although that actually worked within the framework of the EK map as it was known back then, with not much in the way of other settlements.)
Westeros being the size of South America makes some travel times very impressive.
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There are some on-screen representations of the norm that the majority of Azeroth’s population experiences. There are farms, there are peasants and so on, to serve as examples of the normal person’s life.
But let’s say that I want to play a character who has a Westfall farming background. Almost all of the Westfall farms are or were infested with haywire harvest golems or agents of the Defias Brotherhood, plenty of whom are or were magicians. Is this representative of what most Westfall farms are like, or is this just the most dramatic interpretation of a Westfall farm?
Even these relatively mundane and typical locations are embroiled in intriguing and interesting times, as a consequence of being included in the game, as World of Warcraft has no interest in simulating a bunch of typical farms running as they normally would, without any extraordinary events occurring. They’re trapped in the high-magic gonzo nonsense of WoW.
Essentially.
Although Harvest Golems as far as we know aren’t really anything fantastical or magical, they’re shoddy engineering that tends to go very haywire as a result. There probably isn’t 25 Harvest Golems every 10 feet in Canon Westfall vs Game Westfall where there is. Its just a very simple case of this being a video game first and an immersive fantasy world second (or… 100th, depending on how much value you think Blizzard gives the idea of ‘immersive fantasy world’).
Personally, I’ve never really had an issue in my RP reflecting the idea and world at large not knowing about 90% of the things my character probably ends up involved in. Not even he believes half of it.
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Corpseburner isn’t caught up. Corpseburner will post regardless.
- Age: Characters writing 10000 year-old elven archmagi as petulant teenagers or 21 year old squire apprentices as grizzled veterans of war. Eighty year old humans moving like that guy from Baki and literal adolescents outmaneuvering elven wardens.
- The timeline itself: The entire story of Warcraft (from the first Dark Portal to now) takes about forty years. I see a lot of young characters claiming to have seen the invasion of the orcs as a child. Which doesn’t make you young. It makes you 40.
- General disregard for power levels: “Warriorman can defeat Mage by silencing him through punching him”. Okay. Not the average warriorman, though? 100 human mages completely obliterated the forest trolls by casting first-level pyroblasts on the woods. Sure, Grommash Hellscream or Varian Wrynn can solo most mages. But Melee isn’t a be-all-end-all.
Similarly, I think people underestimate just how recently Vulpera became part of anything greater than Vol’Dun. Sure, there are a handful of pirates that may justify a more tech-savvy Vulpera, or a better traveled one.
And while I believe the argument that age and experience is an instant win is bad, I don’t think a Voldunai mage can compete with a trained Silvermoon Magister or the ten-billion human male paladins in the world.
Though perhaps they have shown feats of power to rival my claim and I simply didn’t care enough to research.
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Hey now, you didn’t have to do me like that 
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Are you truly a HMP if you don’t have your religion mandated Elf GF?
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I think people sometimes underestimate the factions themselves. Or more specifically, the actual knowledge and watch they would keep on their military especially in times of truce after long periods of war.
Smaller faction conflicts do happen sometimes and we know that, but I think players underestimate what that means, or the implications that would come from it.
Five people from the opposite faction attacking a small camp on a border region with no heavy casualties? Yeah I can see that happening quite often.
A group of twenty-something battling out a contested area? Also plausible, though likely to get some reprimands when or if word reaches the leadership.
But something like over 200 soldiers committing full on war-crimes, full-scale war over entire territories? Especially when we’re meant to be at peace for now? Yeah that wouldn’t really smooth by.
Seen a couple of times that some people get a bit over-eager with faction conflict that they write up pvp-campaigns with events escalating to such a point it would lead to all out war. But simultaneously refuses to acknowledge that.
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It’s not an elf GF but a human GF , like the Emperor intended.
Tale as old as time, you won’t change their minds, it was a thing with the recent one aswell. Though I should add, attendees did eventually tone it down when it was getting a bit too much.
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Part of the issue with this is there isn’t a load of people hanging around with camera phones to instantly send an email with a video attachment (geolocation included) to prove Aerilen took an opportunistic swipe at the Silver Hand on the road (old habits die hard, so do lesser paladins).
Like short of having a character attend the event and then run off to be a snitch… no one really knows what’s going on. And even then it’s all first hand accounts. Word against word.
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But what if there was a snitch or many? Nothing would come of it still.
And most of the time these things occur near large settlements and a lot of off screen NPCs die in the story.
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Why is it that on these forums in the year 2025 of our good Lord it’s still RP-PVP that is most often hit with the beating end of the stick with this whole talk of going way beyond the scope of what is reasonable? Two hundred good men engaged in a remote, closed off conflict somewhere with bombs going off near settlements seems to trigger an allergic reaction of some people way more than the hundredth riot or plague event in Stormwind.
PvE events in particular often deal with more intense situations, be it in guilds or campaigns where maybe you don’t deal with cosmic level forces, but threats that are pretty dangerous with the stakes established that Very Bad Things will happen to the hubs we know and love unless it is stopped. Wouldn’t the Avengers of Azeroth be called upon to deal with those?
Well no, because it would make for a lame and boring story where nobody gets to do anything and it is the same principle with RP-PVP. Do you really expect people to have a good time with just five guys beating eachother with sticks and stones in some barren wasteland far away from civilisation with absolutely zero logical sense to fight? You need to up the stakes a little and make the characters -care- about something otherwise the RP looks like a pointless PVP battleground with 0 thought or reason behind it.
Anyway I think the topic was exhausted to death in this cool thread, idk.