Off topic:
One of the major issues with WoW's "phase" system is that you have no control over which servers are melded in or which zone you'll end up being displayed on. AFAIK, this gets more complicated when parties of people with at different parts of WoW's MSQ group together as their maps are instanced, but instead of having the NPCs generated client-side like FFXIV does, all NPCs in WoW are server-side and a cross-realm group will only get one map, some of which will not be correctly up to date for the players.
Basically, it'd be just as messy as when SE turns on FFXIV's zone instances, but then people may not even be able to play the game correctly. A cross-realm setup like WoW's would effectively make events like the Grindstone impossible, where there's a larger amount of players on a zone than typical. Or, knowing SE, we'd have characters from other servers getting phased into RP sections and vice-versa, effectively killing open-world RP.
If SE were to split the servers, which could be beneficial, it'd need to be much better planned or they'd need to allow players to decide which of the splits they want to play on. Either way, friend groups would still be separated, even if cross-world friends list could keep them partially together. A setup allowing players to transfer freely (and with in-game interfaces) to any particular server in their datacenter could possibly be a better solution, but that discussion is even further off-topic for this thread.
On Topic:
Given the current cross-world capabilities, can our friends not already play the game with us? Yes, we cannot help them do FATEs or Levequests, but any instanced content is still viable as well as chatting, hopefully better improved in 4.2 with cross-world chat groups.
One of the major issues with WoW's "phase" system is that you have no control over which servers are melded in or which zone you'll end up being displayed on. AFAIK, this gets more complicated when parties of people with at different parts of WoW's MSQ group together as their maps are instanced, but instead of having the NPCs generated client-side like FFXIV does, all NPCs in WoW are server-side and a cross-realm group will only get one map, some of which will not be correctly up to date for the players.
Basically, it'd be just as messy as when SE turns on FFXIV's zone instances, but then people may not even be able to play the game correctly. A cross-realm setup like WoW's would effectively make events like the Grindstone impossible, where there's a larger amount of players on a zone than typical. Or, knowing SE, we'd have characters from other servers getting phased into RP sections and vice-versa, effectively killing open-world RP.
If SE were to split the servers, which could be beneficial, it'd need to be much better planned or they'd need to allow players to decide which of the splits they want to play on. Either way, friend groups would still be separated, even if cross-world friends list could keep them partially together. A setup allowing players to transfer freely (and with in-game interfaces) to any particular server in their datacenter could possibly be a better solution, but that discussion is even further off-topic for this thread.
On Topic:
Given the current cross-world capabilities, can our friends not already play the game with us? Yes, we cannot help them do FATEs or Levequests, but any instanced content is still viable as well as chatting, hopefully better improved in 4.2 with cross-world chat groups.
