Hi all, I had tried to send this through the mail in-game, but the character limit and one message per day rule made it difficult and so I’m putting this here.

Few years back I saw this image comparing video game map sizes and claimed LotRO has an impressive 30k square miles.  I know the game is huge, even more as time goes on, but there is no way it’s that big.  I got to wondering exactly how large it is, and on and off I’d try to look it up with no luck whatsoever.  Logging back in a few months ago got me thinking about it again, though, and I’m kinda determined to get an accurate figure to how large the map really is.  Started working with a few people on reddit and we got the ball rolling, but a few weeks in we sorta lost steam.  I would bump the one guy every week or so but they seem to be busy, then he got sick, and in general seems to be a bit too… detail oriented for me to assume he’ll finish up any time soon.  I’ve decided to outsource the project a little, share with the kin (should have done that from the start :/ ), and catch you up to where we got to.  It’s a lot more work that it looks like it will be, so keep that in mind, but as tedious as it can be it’s pretty fun.

The guy I’ve been working with first replied to a thread I posted with an idea; to run the map through CAD and have it figure out the area of the playable zones.  This required a few things, like getting a reference measurement, scouting the borders of the map, and also finding a terrain map of the game with high enough resolution to be able to outline said borders with any real distinction.  Took a while but last week we got the maps, and in the interim he’d tested out the idea on an older map, and it worked pretty well.  The reference measurement was between the threshold of the West Bree Gate and Elrond’s house’s door, which is 9,894m, and he had outlined the playable areas of half of the zones in Eriador, I guess the ones he knew best off the top of his head.

In the absence of anyone having the same software, or anything similarly capable of calculating the area of an amorphous blob, there are a few ways to do it manually.  Fen mentioned something about using a spreadsheet, I’m assuming using each cell to represent a coordinate and marking them at the edges, then adding up what’s inside, possibly?  She might be able to explain better.  Anyway, then there’s turning each region into a shape or group of shapes and using basic geometry to math it out.  This is by far the easiest method, and I tried it out way before working with other people, but it’s pretty inaccurate, and I wasn’t happy enough with the result to call it.  But, I did get my first realistic measurement of about 300km^2, but I was trying to be as conservative as possible and didn’t want to inflate, so it could be much more than that.  Anyway, to help with this, each degree of longitude and latitude on the map is equal to 200m, as the game measures distance (there’s some debate about if in-game meters actually represent metric meters, I think they’re kinda small myself).

But yeah, basically the current step in any case would be to scout the game’s playable areas and outline them on a super hi-res map, then we can figure out what exactly the next step should be from there.  Here’s some super hi-res maps for your use (They’re massive, up to 45mb, otherwise I’d just post the images themselves).

Thanks for any assistance/ideas, and feel free to just pick up everything and run in your own direction with it, if you want.  No commitments, either, I’ve picked it up and dropped it a few times myself.  Good luck!