The sooner you can get your character to Jeuno, the more you will learn about what the game is, and the more people you will meet. If you shout in Jeuno for help on noob stuff, people will likely be bored enough to be interested in helping, but the starter cities are pretty barren these days. A couple commands to get very familiar with:

/sea all
This searches the server for everyone. If you type /sea all cow, you would get a list of everyone who's name starts with cow. There is also a /sea region, /sea (defaults to area you are in), and /sea all inv (people seeking party), or /sea all 10-30 inv (searches for all people anywhere that are seeking party in the level range you prescribe). After you have been to a zone, you can search that zone too. There are abbreviations for each zone unfortunately, but there is a trick using the auto translate feature (press the tab key while typing the name of the zone).

Example: South Gustaberg
/sea "{South Gustaberg}
You do need the quotation in front of the word for some reason, but not after it.

So if you're typing this, you would do /sea south -----Press Tab----Select South Gustaberg----use arrow keys to go back to the beginning of the word and put a quotation mark------Press Enter.

I'm telling you this because this is how you find parties. If you search Gusgen Mines for yellow names (party leaders) you will usually be able to ask them if you can join their group. (Make sure you have been to the zone first, or it won't work, plus you'll need to know how to get there for the party).