With the continued popularity of the Dungeon Finder, many players have been asking for a way to group up with real-life friends who play on other realms to take on instances together. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about a new feature currently in development that will allow players to invite Real ID friends (http://us.battle.net/en/realid/) of the same faction to a party regardless of the realm they play on, and then queue up for a 5-player regular or Heroic dungeon.
As this is a fairly complex service to develop, we don’t have a release date to share quite yet. It’s important to note that as with some of the other convenience- and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service. We'll have more details to share with you as development progresses -- in the meantime, you may begin to see elements of the feature appear on the World of Warcraft PTR.
Seeing as the sticky, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th threads have reached post cap, a new one must be made.
Links:
Adding Link to Source: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2548785589
Second Thread: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2549105641
Third Thread: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2548995768
Fourth Thread: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2548835896
What happened to this:
We chose to go with the subscription-based model instead of that approach. We've taken the approach that we want players to feel like it's a level playing field once they're in WoW. Outside resources don't play into it -- no gold buying, etc. We take a hard line stance against it. What you get out of microtransactions is kind of the same thing and I think our player base would feel betrayed by it. I think that's something else you have to decide on up-front instead of implementing later.
--Rob Pardo, Blizzard's Senior Vice President of Game Design (2/20/2008)
