Greetings!

[Anova]

Welcome to the game, Mossgnome. It's good to have you join us.

There are two ways for players to form communities. Free Companies (FC) are closer to the traditional guild and hold up to 256 members. FCs provide you with guild storage and houses in the residential district. Be aware you can only choose one FC.

The second community is the linkshell (LS). You can join up to 8 LS, each holding 128 members. The LS is closer to a chat channel in that there is no guild storage, houses, or other material benefits for joining. Most players use them to organize static groups, but RPers also use them as a custom chat channel for RP events. Depending on the group, it is either IC or OOC. I'd recommend you looking in to both FC and LS for your RP needs.

For lore, the forum and site are the obvious official sources of information. Eorzepedia does a good job of consolidating the official lore as well, although you will have to spend a little effort finding everything you need to write a background.

As for macros, here's a couple suggestions.

Mouseover
/ac "Cure" <mo>
If you are playing a healer on the pc, I would suggest using the "mouseover" macro. Instead of tabbing through your allies, you can instead roll your mouse over them and hit the button to heal your target. It's less useful in FATEs, but very useful in dungeons.

Target of Target
/ac "Cure" <tt>
Very useful if you are a new dps and unsure of which target to focus on. If you target your tank, this makes it so you are always attacking the same target as your tank. Helps prevent you from stealing aggro from the tank.

Player Targeting
Changing PS3 Settings Guide
If you are playing on a console or gamepad, this guide will help you to tweak your system to make targeting easier.

Controlling Pet
/pac "obey" <t>
/ac "ruin" <t>
/pac "gust" <t>
/pac "obey" <t>
If you are manually controlling your pet, this makes it so they cast their spells with you. You can change the specific combination of course. It is useful in dungeons where your pet's skill can cause problems if they are used at the wrong time. It also helps immensely with healing and dps once you unlock SMN and SCH. Generally though, you will not need to control your pet to this extent until Lv.40 or higher.

Custom Emotes
/motion "welcome" <t>
/emote "gives <t> a bear hug!"
For the RPer, the /motion command triggers an emote without it's description appearing in the chat. The /emote command sends an emote command. The combination lets you write your own emotes to a series of gestures. Be sure to use the /wait if needed.

More advanced macro commands and combos can wait until later. This is a list of commands usable.