Prior to Cross Realm Zones, Blizzard had implemented a system that allowed players between realms to group with each other in some raids and instances using their Battle.net ID (and now tags). So the other day my friend invited me to an ICC 25 man raid. I was summoned into the instance. At one point, we decided to switch it down to 10 man and had to go outside. Upon leaving ICC, I found myself on the Stormreaver realm. I immediately was marked for PVP and had some issues getting back into ICC. Once it cleared though, I was back inside.
Today, my friends asked me to join up with them again to do a few achievements for Forge of Souls. Once again, I was summoned and entered their realm. After completing the instance, we decided to hit Serpentshrine Cavern (SSC) for some achievements and transmog gear. I still was on their realm. After finishing it up, we decided to keep the group but hang around a bit more.
So I ended up back in Shattrath and found myself once again in my friend’s realm. We decided to go check out the Auction House and I found that it was closed to me. Afterwards, I quit the group and found myself back on Saurfang. That intrigued us so we decided to play around a bit to see how the whole CRZ worked.
Turns out it’s somewhat convoluted. The rules aren’t exactly clear. For instance, it seems that if you’re the leader of the group and invite a higher level toon, you’ll go to that toon’s realm. But when you’re of equal level, then it seems that the other person will appear on your realm if you’re once again the group leader. What was kinda nice was that my friend’s PVP timer eventually wore off when he came to my realm. So we figured that coming to a low population PVE server is advantageous as he could go around looking for rare spawns in peace.
But the whole thing to me is that now we have the possibility of doing cross realm raids. This is going to be great for MoP since I’m located on a low population Oceanic server and have trouble finding people on at my time. However, the few people in my guild can accompany my friends and I to larger raids in the future potentially. One possible thing is that we might be able to get 25 mans in the future given the ability to recruit people from multiple realms.
At any rate, this ought to be quite interesting. I’d love to see more of this in the future.