can u give me sum gold?

I reluctantly started playing World of Warcraft during the closed beta test - I say reluctantly as my last experience with an MMO (Everquest) ended up hitting my life like an atom bomb, resulting in me meeting my wife (very good) but also not playing any other games for over a year (not so good). I also spent a disproportionate amount of time farming silk in the West Commons and sitting on my butt staring at my spellbook waiting for my mana to recharge, which in the end drove me to give up the game.

Anyhow, I played early in the closed beta, levelled up my Warlock to around lvl 30, then quit because at that point, they didn't really have much content available for players beyond that level. As a result, I didn't pick up the retail package until a few months after its release - what this meant was that I picked up the game again shortly before pretty much everyone I knew was hitting level 60 and burning out. Leaving my character (Cryptana) alone, and worst of all, guildless.

I've never really played an MMO long enough to really reap the benefits of being in a guild - in particular, it seems to come in handy when you need large groups of people to go off and raid some dungeon. At the low levels, it seems a guild is mostly useful for:

• Having someone to chat with while you play the game
• Keeping yourself from being spammed with "u wanna join my guild?" requests by everyone who sees you don't have a guild.
  

To make a long story short, my friends quit the game and their guild disbanded, and shortly thereafter got invited to a new guild, which I joined against my better judgement. Through the whole experience, I learned a couple of valuable lessons:

1. If someone you don't know comes up and invites you to a guild, they obviously don't care who is in the guild. It's not that they have been secretly observing you and have decided that you have The Right Stuff. It's that they have briefly observed that you have a pulse, and would therefore increase their guild membership by one, so Welcome Aboard, Cowboy! And so you're joining a guild consisting of people whose sole defining characteristic is their ability to click the "Accept Guild Invite" button. Which leads us to the second lesson:
   
2. There's a segment of the MMO population that doesn't really "play" the game, per se - for them, the game is more of an elaborate instant messaging system with highly customizable avatars and emotes. These players tend to be younger - in fact, I'd say my daughter falls pretty squarely in this demographic - and are the ones who can often be heard complaining about how bored they are, which makes no sense when you imagine somebody playing a game (why play a game that you find boring?) but makes perfect sense when you realize that from their point of view, they are just hanging out in IM, chatting.

Anyhow, most of these random guilds are filled with people in the "chatter" demographic, which makes guild chat feel like I'm eavesdropping on some 13-year-old's IM window:

Allakablam: Blah blah blah I LOVE PANDA EXPRESS LA LA LA!
Nooby: can sum1 give me sum gold?
Allakablam: I'm BORED!
Nooby: lets get mairreed - does any1 want 2 merry me?
Allakablam: Yes, I'm so bored. I'll marry you.
Nooby: i need 2 by a weding dress can u give me sum gold?
Cryptana: ...
Cryptana: Please kill me now.
Cryptana has left the guild.

Maybe things would be better if I played on a dedicated roleplaying server. But somehow I doubt it. I think gaming culture has changed (it's not just geeks anymore) and I just don't fit in.

Sigh.