New player confused

[Atoli]

Sometimes when I complain about it people just say "join a FC," or sign-up for a bunch of linkshells. As if those were easy solutions to a new player.

The problem is I don't want niche/closed group social. I want the open, expansive extrovert experience. I want to meet new people, hear new ideas, listen to others debate about random stuff.

You can have up to 8 Linkshells with 218 people in them. That beats out how many people are usually active in the NN by FAR. The only difference is that it is upon yourself to seek out these groups or build such large communities yourself.
I'm in the Lala LS of my server (218 people), the anime/manga LS (218 people), the Linkshells of my 2 former FCs (40-80 people per LS), two big Linkshells of my circle of friends (one for English-speaking ones, one for German speaking ones) which are also both around 30-40 members and in the "Germans on Ragnarok" LS (218 people again). 8th LS is for Static, so that's not exactly one for talking, but yeah.
Especially the big, public ones constantly have members leaving and new ones joining, the topics are never limited to one certain topic and the world feels very open, communicative and alive (so much so, that I tend to ignore the chat quite often because it is so overwhelming ).

[Train88]

Most mmog are like that these days i think. People like voice chat over types chat and it leaves unwilling or unable to setup the hardware for it behind. English is not my first language and some people have strong accent wit the added sound quality, sometimes i can't even tell if someone is talking to me. I did give it a shot once, bought a cheap jack plug microphone, tried to configure it. Turns out i blew up the voice chat, my output correction was way off or something.

So yeah, send a shout in a major city and chances are a mentor will invite you to the novice channel. Then you may want to work towards mentor status yourself.

[MistakeNot]

The reason you don't see much chatting in the standard channels is because there are no global channels - they are all either limited to a zone or to a small number of people.
I have seen this in many other MMOs that also only have regional channels as well - almost always quiet except maybe in the major hubs where people gather.

[Nestro]

I very much enjoy the nooby chat. Just ask in /sh for someone to invite you. The chat is very alive on Shiva. I love it^^

[Niwashi]

I'm not sure about Tonberry, but on a lot of servers, Limsa's lower decks seems to be the most popular place for open chat in the ARR zones (either in the /say channel near the aetherite and its nearby marketboard, or /shout from anywhere). And if there isn't any going on there at the moment, you have the best chance there of getting some started. Try asking advice on something. That can often get people talking.

(Unfortunately, this makes it also a popular spot for RMT spam bots, but once you report and blacklist today's current batch of them, that can keep their garbage from interrupting you.)

But yeah, as others have mentioned, this game's zone dependent chat system severely limits open world chatting as compared to any game that has a public server-wide channel.

[Hechicera]

The Novice Network confused me as a returnee. I made a new character and read the guides. They mention the NN but they don't say you have to actively shout for an invite. They just say you will be invited by a mentor.

I am leveling crafting so I am in towns synthng a lot. I have gotten many spam invites to FCs. Thank you those few that whispered first. I was waiting on some family returning with me to decide on a FC together, so I was FC-less a while. Not a problem except for the spam invites. But still no invite to the NN!

I've had my sprout now at least two weeks, nothing over L30 and wanted to call attention to the confusion of reading about the NN but still having no idea how to access it, and to point out the contrast between spontaneous NN invites (non-existent) and spontaneous also often asocial FC invites (near as often as RMT!). So, from this perspective it seems less than useful. Added irony, from reading the mentor qualifications, my old character meets them.