Hey folks, chatted with one of our tech guys about the background here, basically what this comes down to is that the friends list / chat is built on a completely different service than challenge functionality. Most pertinently, friends list / chat is shared between games (i.e. with LoL), while challenge (and matchmaking) is game-specific.
The team that owns the underlying friend / chat tech has specifically made improvements to it to support cross-shard friends / chat, while the only "improvement" to LoR's matchmaking breadth is relative to LoL's in that LoR has fewer, bigger (i.e. include more countries) shards than LoL. Unfortunately, we do still need to have at least a few distinct shards, which means separate matchmaking pools.
Still definitely get the annoyance, but hope this clarifies.
/u/Wuuthrad99 so...
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