There's no limit to the number of players in chat rooms. You can either invite people, or they can join automatically if they know the password (if you assign one). There is also a channel index so people can find your gaming community's chat channel when they sign in. People can also chat with the rest of your community while not signed in using any ol' XMPP chat client. In this way, people can stay in contact in and out of the game.

Within a chat channel you can see people by their Alias. So if we were in a chat room right now you'd see Victoria, Caspian, Silv, and Briseadh happily chatting along. 

As for families, as you'll see in a few weeks there's no official "cap" to family size, however the family mechanics will make it such that all 1200 people who show up on day one won't be able to be part of the same family (you can only pop 'em out so fast, after all).

Some of them will be part of the same family, some may be part of the same dynasty, and others may just be neighbors that live near by. Once in-game though, there's no limit to guild size. And ultimately, people may identify more by their village, county, duchy, principality, or kingdom. So you can build a family, build a guild, or build a realm.

And Victoria, you're 1/3 right. We do want to encourage face-to-face communication, but equally important - not everyone in CoE is who they seem. ::evil grin:: We disassociated chat from communication so you can be "online" and "in-game" with nobody knowing who you are.

Finally, by moving out-of-character chat to the channels, we're hoping in-game chat will remain more or less in-character, or at the very least, on-topic. Put another way, chat in the channels is between players. Chat in the chat window is between characters.

Time based cap? The system is far more intelligent and awesome than that. :-)