Gnollrunner said:
Now let's say you don't scale your character. So yeah your world is bigger, but now it has half the detail as a result, mountains are higher etc, so there is a tangible degradation.
The question was only about the map, so the static world. And because the OP asked about performance before, it was clear to me that he uses this as an example to talk about geometry resolution. He stated he want's to use geometry at lower resolution for stuff which is far away.
It sounded he just came up with this idea by his own, and wanted to ask if that's usual practice for others too.
I agree it would have been better to express himself without the term ‘scaling’, to avoid the confusion we got. But he just expressed his new idea, and did not know or think yet about established terminology like 'LOD'.
That's at least my interpretation, which seems on point.
Regarding mountains and rocks, it is indeed common practice to scale them up or down as needed, as the structures have fractal properties and work in multiple scales. So there is nothing wrong with the initial thought, it was just expressed in unusual ways.