Here's the story behind the shock of the cross-server chat that suddenly appeared after the recent patch. This is from the Station's Headline News section:

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Cross Server Chat - An Unannounced Feature EQ Technical Director, Scott Hartsman, answered questions from the community about an unannounced feature that was included with the July 24th patch. Yes - Cross Server chat is something that was done intentionally - At no small amount of work for both our development and ops teams, for that matter. The reason that it wasn't announced is because in order to allow this, we had to change around the chat systems quite a bit. We needed a few days of measuring what would happen with existing channel chat under the new arrangement as a proof of concept. If that blew up before anyone was chatting globally, we'd have known that we had more work to do. :) The other reason that it wasn't advertised yet -- As it stands, people have the ability to spam (and in some cases, are spamming) cross-server without any of the standard in-game repercussions. (i.e. If you're a jerk: I won't group with you, my guild won't help you, etc.) That definitely wasn't part of the plan, and we'd hoped to have that addressed before it was released. Over the next few days, we'll be adding more controls that allow people to keep their channels and private messages local to their servers, among other things. Best, - Scott Thanks for filling us in Scott!