Hello there
I wanted to bring up a discussion regarding methods of IC remote communication.
In lore we have witnessed magical means, mundane means like letters and other more exotic methods, like Draenic Crystals, Radios, Telepathy and such as.
In RP we have seen a variety of methods, including the most infamous “Buzzboxes” carried by various guilds as some form of contact methods so I am intrigued what is acceptable and what is not.
What is lore friendly and what is wrong?
there’s a ton you can do but no matter what it is, if you make it an unstoppable action you’re doing it wrong.
Simple as.
My personal preference is to limit some of the more extreme levels of convenience. Letters > magical telepathy / etc, IMO.
If others want to be able to communicate readily and without much difficulty, there’s enough backing in lore to give them a number of options to do that.
With WoW as it is, it ultimately comes down to preference and what’s conducive to your enjoyment - not what’s right or wrong.
Personally for me it’s a fairly simple of:
The Good Way: Using any means, be it magic, SCIENCE!, animals etc, to do long-distance communications with friends during casual RP & or event.
The Bad Way: Using it as an excuse to call your guard guild in discord/gchat to swarm upon the lone thief with 20+ players and /emote kill them.
Pretty much this.
There’s lots of legit ways to deliver messages but to do it to get an upper hand like that sucks.
At that point, it’s effectively become meta-gaming for the sake of “winning” the roleplay, yeah.
Emote trying to activate your way of communicating so it can be interrupted, or you end up with God emoting being able to call in your allies and so on. It’s boring RP that way. Also use communication sparingly in this fashion.
I know this char doesn’t have anything convienent like the Astral Projection used by certain Magi ingame , or Gnomish Buzzboxes.
Instead he communicates through Scrying Stones; which are rather “large” orbs placed upon a holder; which allows 2 way visual and audio communication. Sure it might not be convienent like other means of communication; but it works for me in RP and I find it good to have it have a big sort of limitation, lest I be tempted to “abuse” it 
If it positively impacts the role-playing experience, go ahead.
If it negatively impacts the role-playing experience, don’t go ahead.
That tends to be my take on matters such as these. Of course, whether the impact is negative or positive is largely subjective, so that could be an issue.
You: summoning your guildies OOC
Me, an intellectual: blowing a horn to rally your allies
Would be a cool way for a DK, anyone remember horn of winter?
During one quest in Icecrown, Darion even provides you with a horn for the expressive purpose of calling death knights to your side.
I still have my old preWrath event horn trinket that calls an Argent Dawn paladin.
Everyone loves a horn.
Yet you chose antlers instead…
Put it this way, I can communicate to anyone on the planet, whoever to do so I either have to use an unwieldy machine (such as this laptop) or I have to take out my mobile phone and visibly use it. Every Guild I have been in, or interacted with for that matter, has used a form of communication that was visibly used and needed actions to do so, so therefore could be stopped. I mean that is where we are with technology right now. I know in some regards WoW is more advanced tech wise, but not in all ways. We always just went with “Our communicators have a two zone range…in the air…Built up urban areas disrupt it” So using it to call in buddies in a city is a no go, using it three hundred feet away in the air is fine.
So yeah, Narrative rule of cool, not rule of tool.
Solution: Jack Sparrow
Buzzboxes or other methods of communication are likely not only possible, but commercially available, if somewhat too exotic for common folk. We see such technology and magic used for coordinating warfare and other operations frequently, so it only makes sense for players to have access to such as well.
That being said, I do think there should be limitations related to either interference or infrastructure. If you’re in a completely undeveloped or destroyed area, there’s a good chance you might have some trouble with reception. Similarly, in the middle of a battle, various forms of interference may make couriers a better options for short-distance communication.
I think the bigger issue is actually travel times: if you can just call up someone on another continent and they arrive in 10 minutes to help you, that somewhat undermines any kind of tension. On the other hand, we do see characters like Jaina teleporting all over the place, so maybe this is not actually that unexpected?
Travel is a whole big issue of its own, yeah. Again, it comes down to personal preference in roleplay, but I would much rather see people stick to the portal spots with Kirin Tor approval. It makes things, as said, far less easy and swift. Mages throwing up portals with pin-point accuracy in roleplay is counterproductive.
While Jaina can pretty much do as she pleases with the ease that she pleases, I think as players we have the choice to follow that or slow things down.
Send a courier tbh
If you’re RPing a Tauren you can only use smoke signals for long distance communication.
Akamito got ambushed by a criminal guild in the alleys in Thunder Bluff once. He set up a quick campfire in rapid time and smoked out some signals to call his nearby friends to help him.
Got accused of meta gaming but I thought it was entirely reasonable.