Here's a
link to something more official, but here's the skinny if you haven't heard already:
A new technology to be featured in Mists is that certain zones--specifically lower level ones, but not including starting zones nor the Pandaria zones (and definitely not capital cities)--will allow you to see and interact with players from other realms. The pool of realms will be restricted by realm type, so in our case, we'll only see people from other
normal RP realms. The idea behind this is that, given how the majority of characters on a realm at any given time are at or near the level cap, this will make zones otherwise less populated to appear just as populated as the more frequented zones.
This is a mixed blessing to me. I imagine this will make farming and/or leveling professions more difficult. If we were on a PvP server, I think this would be a frickin' nightmare.
But from an RP perspective, I see this as mostly good. I'd like to think that random RP will happen more because there will be a greater chance of running into RPers this way. Some of us might even return to these lower level zones just to see if there's RP happening. It'll allow people to interact with other RPers from other RP servers without having to transfer over. Gives us a pulse to put our finger on, so to speak.
That having been said, the only possible headache I see is in setting up RP events; more particularly, ones with a PvP aspect to them. Oh, and spillover of the crazies from Goldshire. *shudders*
Thoughts?