> One problem with MMORPGs is that they just take so much time. As a young adult working full time and trying to maintain a reasonably balanced lifestyle, I don't know how to find a guild or establish friendships in a game while acknowledging that I'm only gonna be putting in a couple hours a week.

One thing you could do is pick a game that Gaiscioch [1] has a significant presence in and join them. Those currently are Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online. (Previous games were, in reverse order, Rift, Warhammer Online, and Dark Age of Camelot. I believe there is still quite a bit of Gaiscioch activity in Rift, but I don't think it is getting the full Gaiscioch treatment any more).

If I had to sum up Gaiscioch as a guild in a short list of keywords, I'd probably pick something like "hard-core casual social".

That's a set of keywords you usually don't find for one guild, so I'll explain in more detail.

What I mean by "casual" is that Gaiscioch has no requirements for how much time you have to put into the game, or how rapidly you have to advance your character, or how well equipped you have to be, or what classes you have to play, or how many alts you can create and play.

What I mean by "social" is that the focus of Gaiscioch is on community. They want to create a friendly gaming environment where everyone from grandparents to children, of all genders, races, religions, etc., is welcome and can have a good time.

What I mean by "hard-core" is two things. First is that Gaiscioch does have people who put a lot of effort into the game. Some of them do the same kind of hard core raiding and pursuit of the endgame that you typically see in an uber guild. As I said above, there is no pressure to participate in that, but if you want to its there.

Second is that Gaiscioch's leaders get heavily into the lore of the game, and organize server-wide community events based on that lore.

Let me give an example.

Warhammer Online was built around the fight between two factions, Order and Destruction. Keeps and fortresses could be seized by players, and when the players of one side accomplished certain goals in that regard, they could gain access to the other side's capital city to loot and pillage. There were four "tiers" of this, organized by level range, so this realm vs. realm conflict could be experienced at all levels.

Gaiscioch, which was playing Order on the Badlands server, organized an ongoing event called the Battle for the Badlands which involved weekly scheduled raids to try to take take Destruction keeps and forts. These raids were announced well in advanced, and well publicized to try to get a lot of people to show up. I believe they were also coordinating with one or two big Destruction guilds to get them to get a big Destruction turnout. These events would not just do the top tier--they would also do lower tier targets so that people who didn't have tier IV characters could join the fun. They put up a website for the Battle of Badlands, and had a scoring system to keep track of who had won each week's event.

These events would draw enough people so that Gaiscioch members were just a minority of the players, but Gaiscioch had enough experienced RvR leaders so that they could generally spread them out among all the Order groups and coordinate with each other, allowing for some large scale strategy and tactics across multiple zones. (I think Destruction had a similar arrangement).

For a large fraction of the Badlands population (both Order and Destruction), these events were the high point of their Warhammer Online experience.

[1] http://www.gaiscioch.com/about/