Hello and welcome!
Hopefully we can get you fixed up here. First of all, Paragon Chat is essentially a fancy chat room with a few neat tricks. We don't have combat or powers (except some travel and novelties.) With the exception of a few, most of the NPCs are just there for looks and cannot be interacted with. And depending on what time of day you were on, there may just not have been any other players around. When you log in, do you get the following messages in the chat box: "XMPP link successfully established!" & "Joined channel 'Paragon chat'? If so, you're doing great, there just aren't any other players around. If not we'll have to dig deeper.
Oh, and here's an old post of some of the things we can do:
https://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php?topic=12499.0I'll keep my eyes open for you on PChat, and hopefully we can get you enjoying our city again.