Who's Watching Your Back?

I've seen several varying conversations recently about WoW's new cross-realm feature, so I figured I'd do a write-up of my experiences so far with it.  I'll only be discussing what I personally have observed, so if you're looking for Blizzard's final word on the matter, you'll need to go elsewhere.

I started noticing people from different servers when I was visiting the auction house in Silvermoon City on my RP-PvP realm.  Normally it's pretty dead at the time of night that I was there, but I saw no fewer than four other low-leveled characters running back and forth between the mailbox and the auctioneers.  Closer inspection revealed that they were, in fact, from other realms.

In the time since, I've teamed up for various things with other-realmers, as I like to call them.  While mining for Adamantite in Shadowmoon Valley, the General chat went off with someone needing help with an elite for a quest.  As I was max level, and a little bored of just circling around looking for blinking dots, I partied up and was surprised to find that the requester was an other-realmer.  He tagged the elite, I polished it off, and we talked about the cross-realm feature some in General for the zone, which got the attention of a few others.  Sure enough, several different realms were represented.

Later, a friend on my new PvE realm was trying to find someone willing to run Hyjal quests with his almost-maxed character.  I was on my old server, attempting to level a guild to 2 so that I could transfer it, when I thought it would be interesting to test the cross-realm feature.  We got a third person involved, all partied up, and proceeded to quest with little to no difficulty.  It was around this point that I started noticing strange lag spikes when zoning into areas, or sometimes just crossing from one zone to another, or from one quest area to another.

Most recently, we ran our first Heroic Dragon Soul with an other-realmer in the group, and other than the usual amount of lag, we ran into no difficulty.  I can't help but wonder if this will effect future progression, or if we'll find that content in MoP will be limited to same-realmers at first, and eventually opened up to cross-realm capability.

There's a few things I'll be testing out later, like if you can cross-realm quest with Refer-A-Friend bonuses; this would make those tricky situations easier, like the ones where you don't have any open slots on your current server, but still want to level with your buddy.  Or if you're two established players taking advantage of the RaF mount, and just happen to normally play on different servers; who gets stuck with a character that's not on their realm?  It'll also be interesting to know what would happen if, say, you're pulling a raid for the Darkmoon Rabbit, and you add a cross-realmer to your team.  Do they see the rabbit?  Will you see theirs, if there is one?  Can you wind up with two at once?  Now there's a scary thought.

I'll keep you guys informed of my discoveries, and if you have anything you'd like me to check out, feel free to drop a comment!