Testing Cross-Realm Arena and Battleground queues on Wrath Classic PTR

This is a very good question. If we do indeed move forward with this change on live US region realms, we will need to re-merge Oceanic and US PvP queues for it to work properly in the US/Oceanic region. I don’t have a lot else to report on this at this moment, as our focus here is to test the baseline functionality of cross-realm PvP groups, but in the months since we split the US and Oceanic battlegroups, this is has been a very, very frequent request, so it’s something we are looking at very closely.

Hopefully we’ll be ready to share more very soon. Thanks for asking!

Greetings,

As we near the release of patch 3.4.1 and Ulduar, one frequent topic is transfer and new character creation restrictions present on some of the largest realms in the US and EU. We understand the desire for players to play with their friends on these realms, and while these realms are not currently queuing, their population is still larger than the realms were designed for, and queues could return with the release of future content. There are many other very healthy and active realms available that are thriving, and we have no plans to lift realms restrictions on these realms in the near future.

We do recognize, however that PvP has been cross realm for all of almost all of WoW’s existence, and that realm restrictions get in the way of utilizing team-less Arena that was added in Wrath of the Lich King Classic. As a result, we’ve implemented a system to allow you to group with players on other realms, and queue into Arena matches and Battlegrounds together. We feel that this is a sensible change considering that Arenas have been cross server since their inception in 2007, and Battlegrounds have been cross-realm since shortly after they were introduced back in original World of Warcraft.

We’ve enabled this functionality on the Wrath Classic PTR, and we’d love it if you wanted to hop in with some friends to help us test this.

How to use this:
In order to invite a player from a different realm, you’ll need to type /invite playername-realmname. So for example, if I was on the Classic PTR Realm 1 and I wanted to invite “Aggrend” from the Classic PTR Realm 2, I’d type (with no spaces):

/invite Aggrend-ClassicPTRRealm2

…and the other player would see the following:

From there you would be placed into a cross-realm group:

At this point, the group leader could queue for Battlegrounds or Arenas as normal. You will join the same match, be placed on the same team, and gain honor and arena rating as you would with any normal Arena or Battleground group.

Please note that this can only be used to allow players on the same faction to group with each other cross-realm. Additionally, this system may only be used to queue for pvp and will not allow you join the group leader’s layer in the outdoor world, or enter non-BG, non-Arena dungeons or raid instances with the group leader in any way. Party chat functions as you’d expect it to, but past chatting and doing Arenas and Battlegrounds, group members on separate realms may not directly interact with each other at all.

We’d love to get feedback on how this functions as well as any bug reports for anything that feels like it doesn’t work like it should with this system. Thank you for all of your bug reports and feedback so far for patch 3.4.1, and we are really looking forward to seeing you tackle Ulduar, Titan Rune Dungeons, and everything else present in Phase 2 of Wrath Classic when 3.4.1 releases very soon!