My friend group used a custom chat channel (/join AnyChatChannelNameHere) in Retail and Classic to communicate while allowing us to be in different guilds. We’ve discovered that in WoW Forever, while the claim is that we’re all on one giant mega-realm, in reality there are at least two realms per game mode in the beta. You can see which realm you’re on by running the command
/run print(GetNormalizedRealmName(), GetRealmName())
Custom chat channels do not appear to function across these realms. My buddies and I on “ClassicBetaPvE” are not able to chat with the people on “ClassicBetaPvE2” - /joining the same channel name just creates a seperate, isolated channel for them.
I see this deeply affecting addon makers as well - addons often use private chat channels as a way to transfer data between addon users. Blizzard supports this by providing ways to make the addon channel traffic invisible to regular chatters, but if I’m running an addon on one realm and my buddy, in the same game mode, happens to be on a different internal realm, our addons won’t see each other.
I have submitted this as a bug, but I wonder if there are any plans from Blizzard to make these channels work across realms per game mode?