World of Warcraft Online Atlas - for the directionally challenged
Can't find your way back to Stormwind after a long starry trek across Azeorth? Are you still swimming circles in Booty Bay trying to find the Outlands? Looking for a new instance to hunt in because you are too lazy to read your quest log? If you answered yes to all three questions, then you need the World of Warcraft Online Atlas! Blizzard has decided to make World of Warcraft easier than ever before, (is that even possible? -- surely I jest), with this online flash-based interactive map atlas that shows various points of interests: towns, cities, dungeons and further details on level ranges and town accommodations.
The map is well done, but a bit basic for my taste, I'm more of an old-school dead-tree atlas kind-of-guy myself. The music is a tad redundant, but you can shut it off. To be critical, one thing I'd love to see with an interactive map like this is the ability to calculate distance between points, the actual measurement from point a to point b. Normally the only way to gauge the actual size of a Virtual World is through a wacky formula and some serious trial and error, even then the results are never 100% correct. Something on that scale done by Blizzard would be quite magnific for armchair cartographers everywhere. It'd also be neat if the map showed spawn area densities and percentages on item drops per region including different tradeskill spawns, because I'm a data nerd, and well, I want that information official and it'd look all nice and snazzy on their interactive map. To give Blizzard some credit when it comes to in-game statistics, they already track a bunch of interesting data and share it on their Game Statistics page. Haha. The Voidwalker still takes the most dangerous creature crown! Eat it Felguard.
