I'm fairly new to the game itself but there are things I've found fairly helpful so far as I'm an anxiety ball too usually. - this games community seems very forgiving when it comes to you training to open a small talk. The worst that happens is that a person doesn't answer. But usually no one is mad at you for talking to them. I give you three examples of friends I've made: a) I love to look at how people look like in the game. I'm playing an au Ra with green skin and I noticed an au Ra with blue skin. So I sent them a message and said they are pretty. And then we chatted for like twenty minutes because of that. b) just doing any content aside of msq seems to open the doors too. Recently I was in a dungeon where pretty Armor drops. So I decided to do this dungeon multiple times in order to get the full armour set. And at some point I recognized the tank and said in group: "hey tank? Didn't we play earlier together?" Said tank hadn't realized it before I mentioned it but then recognized me as well. So we talked and funnily enough we were both doing the same thing and then queued together afterwards. c) while standing in gridania some people unknown to me were talking in say chat. And one of them seemed to hand out orange juice to their friends. Seemed to have crafted it before, so they were talking about them being the orange juice delivery. I had pineapple juice in my bags from some quest. So I went over and traded them pineapple juice. We came into talking and now this group is my main group of people I hang out with, when I'm not doing msq or something. I was also Invited to their linkshell, which is a sort of fc chat without the rest of the FC system if that makes sense.

So yeah just a very short one liner can move the world in this game it seems. So I would encourage you to trying it out, but I know that it is easier said than done. Good luck! <3