As convoluted as it sounds, the best current answer, is "No and Yes". That is, of course, not a satisfactory answer, so let me explain: The current premise for TBW, is the occurances of "Ruptures"; fractures in space and time - to what and where, if anything or anywhere, is unkown - but it begs the question whether or not the timeline we're aware of is accurate or not. Multiple - if not all - TBW agents are reporting "fuzzy memories", vague recollections of some past, but a past in which the causal links seem flimsy at best - where action and consequence seem detached, like you might experience in a dream. Some might have an inkling of a memory regarding the TSW factions, but the memory itself is more reminiscient of how you might remember a distant family-member you once met during your childhood; their consequence on your reality is very limited, if not non-existant, but you might know that you are somehow more than strangers, and remember the smell of those cigarillos that family member used to smoke. Then again, the harder you think, the more likely you might be to question if that person was ever real, or just something you've dreamt up. Factions from TSW as we know them aren't present in "our" universe, to the best of our knowledge. That isn't to say they definately do not exist, but if they do, they might very well be shadows of their TSW counterparts. The Filth, Agartha, The Buzzing, they might all have happened in the TBW Universe, but so far, if they did, the consequences of those events are nowhere to be seen. There is, of course, always the possibility that we will come across either of the TSW factions later on, but due to the low coherency between cause, event, and consequence, we can only guess as to how "alike" they will be to their "actual" TSW counterparts. If we go beyond the lore-centric explanation, the decision to divorce TBW and TSW was to let TBW evolve into its own thing, and to not infringe on the canon of either TSW, nor the intended canon for TBW. However, because of the whole "timeline" thing, it can't be completely ruled out that the two games won't interact at some (much) later point. Either way, it can be a bit confusing to wrap your head around, which is also why I hope people will correct me if I'm horribly mistaken (it's been a while since I've thought about this specifically), but I believe that is the current gist of it.
Indeed, the interview with Joel Bylos where they talk about things such as bridging TSW and TBW can be found here.
For my characters of Team Jewel, they have each their own area of expertise. Jule Johnson aka "Bombshell Blonde" predates both the Secret War ARG and the TSW MMORPG on Facebook (5 years this week) several years as her universe was expanding beyond the confines of Paragon City in CoH. She is the witch & teacher of alternate mythologies; she deals in arcane knowledge. For the 2nd last gate: she wanted to input "ASMODEUS" but I thought it wouldn't be valid unless the rest of gates' passwords were entered first. She never lets me forget it. LoL Fun fact: The rest of her Team don't let Jule handle a gun EVER (http://chronicle.thesecretworld.com/character/Jule). Collateral Damage & Friendly Fire incidents way outnumber the percentage of positive hits As much is Jule is leader, she leaves tactical & interior design to Mary Donovan. Combat medic & mercenary, she like the rest of the team worked in the background until most recently in the last few months, became possessed with the bee daemon & started in TSW and on Twitter. She is also good with computers with hacking Jule's email & FB accounts for fun. She knows her way around a computer. Finally for this post, there is Sven Erickson that Jule still has stopped bothering trying to say his name correctly. He's good with detective work, macrame & a gun. There's others but their uses come up when the need arises to keep IC's knowledge with IC origins' of the characters. How I see it in a nutshell: Both are related to the real world (Facebook & Twitter) but TBW & TSW are distant cousins to each other.
i've been figuring out how much my characters interact with each other in general. whether we have the link between TSW and TBW or not, old memories still exist for some of my agent characters. this is dependent on how our timelines and such are running as well. because alternate timeline agents could have some bleed between the lines if the boundaries are thin. i'd honestly have to think about how some of them just interact between worlds, and whether they can or not.
