Just curious if it s me or I haven t turned it on, but I finally tried out Aion and I see no chat at all. I don t really want the constant nattering of some games, but it sure is nice to see some. It feels so odd when theres none. Hell I saw a few people asking questions and not a peep. Why is that, is it is so easy to solo so no one cares to chat. Just odd to me I guess.

There was no chat in WAR either. Very strange how the PvP games have so little chat. And I've seen some chat in Aion, but it was typical Barrens type, people testing the profanity filter and such, and so far I have not found a way to report or block. Maybe chat options aren't fully implemented yet? There is no explaining it, some games have it, like LoTRo, and some games don't.

There are multiple global chat channels in Aion. They are currently disabled in the beta.

Expect much talking come release time.

 Aion actually has global chat, if you press enter to open the input chat interface and click on the (...) baloon you'll notice:

- /1 = Local Channel - Probably encompasses the whole map you are in.
- /2 = Trade Channel - Probably encompasses the whole race. 
- /3 = LFG Channel - Probably encompasses the whole race. In China I'd see people frequently linking their group quests to look for groups.
- Private Chat Channels - For your small group of friends, great thing as you don't need to be in the same legion.

The one thing that fails in China Aion is that all these chats get unusable due to RMT spam, but that's mainly because China Aion gives free hours to every account created, enough for the RMT companies to automatize account creation and spam the global chats before getting banned (or not).

Hopefully US Aion will not provide any kind of trial at least until they have some restrictions to global chats such as only non-trial accounts can speak into them (like in many  games), otherwise it gets ridiculous as manually banning automated account creations that create level 1 toons to spam is unfeasible.

These global chats are not yet enabled in the Beta.

Once they enabled the chat channels in the Chinese retail there was non-stop chatting/trading etc.

Seems like it's not enabled in the beta as others have said (I'm not playing the beta so I don't know), but it's not going to be like WAR you can be sure of that.

People need to chat in Aion. The economy is meaningful and crafting is very important so the trade channel will be full of people chatting. Likewise for finding groups. It's not an open group system like WAR.

So while WAR didn't have any chat because the economy sucked and money was dead easy to come by, + crafting was practically non existant. Also there was no need to look for groups as it had an open group thingy, coupled with the PQs. No one needed to chat.