So I registered with MMORPG and checked out the situation in the chat rooms, discovering each time that there was nobody there. Now we're dealing here with a "community" of close to 30,000 people, and at least some of those people, judging from the over 66,000 postings in the discussion forums, are active. But I've yet to find anyone in the chat rooms. This may be because I'm taking a peek when other people (primarily in North America) are asleep, but we're dealing with gamers, and I tend to think that wherever they live, they're awake well into the night.
(The Site Statistics copied here are a one-time screen shot. Over the course of a day, however, they seem to be fairly consistent - though I may be missing prime time. Over the course of a number of hours I've noticed that a few more than ten people have become members, and that almost ten new postings have been added in the discussion forums. During that time, however, I haven't noticed that anyone has entered the chat rooms.)
But beyond the question of why I personally would want to enter the chat rooms (for research purposes, of couse, what a dumb question!) it seems to make sense to ask why any member of MMORPG would want to take part in chat. These people are, after all, involved in online gaming. That means that their prefered form of online activitity is a form of social interaction. And if they're interacting in games, meaning that they're conversing with other players, why would they want to do so in chat as well? I haven't entered these games in order to see what happens in them, but pretty much by definition they deal with interaction with other gamers, and even if that isn't exactly a form of chat, it pretty much satisfies the same need.