
Currently the region channels are fine if you are doing the cat herding thing and moving 2 or more groups of folks through an area such as a tryker<>zorai trip so folks can get spawns/tp tickets. But in general, the game is pretty much without conversation when it comes to anything other than guild chat. Region chat is there, but since it only covers the small part of the continent that you are in, you generally don't see much happening there. People are left with a feeling of an empty world.
Early on in beta we had a global channel that covered the entire continent... there was quite a bit of chatting, group making, newbie question answering, and general socialization things going on over it... Certainly more than the current region channels get. Things like "any <insert class> want to help a group of <insert number> kill <insert thing>", didn't require a harvester to be foraging in the same part of the zone where it was asked in.