Getting divorced was a lonely experience for Josh Schweitzer. Spending his days overseeing construction workers and his evenings caring for his 3-year-old son, he had no one to talk to. But there was one group of people who helped him pull through -- even though he'd never laid eyes on most of them.

 

They were his World of Warcraft friends -- "guild people," he calls them. They live all over the world and spend 20, 30 or more hours a week together in the online world of Azeroth as druids, priests, warriors and rogues, slaying monsters and collecting wow gold.

 

 Schweitzer's friends in the Dread Pirates guild are a tiny subset of the 11.5 million people who have made Warcraft the most successful online video game on the planet.

 

Like many other massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), Warcraft is set in a "Lord of the Rings"-like fantasy realm where players create characters and undertake missions, some team-based and some solo, to gather resources and earn wow gold.

 

Most players become part of a guild, a closely knit group that plays the game together while chatting. Active guilds spend hundreds and even thousands of hours a year together online, often developing strong bonds.

 

For Schweitzer, 27, a Bakersfield resident, the Dread Pirates replaced the co-workers, family and buddies who someone his age might typically draw on in a difficult time like a divorce. He confided in them over his headset.

 

"The only people I had to talk to about it were guild people," he recalled recently. "All of my friends are in Dread Pirates. I don't really have any others."we collect wow gold together in game.

 

 Schweitzer, dressed in board shorts and flip-flops, was sitting with them on a Thursday night in August at the Lost Bar, a Peter Pan-themed drinking hole near the Disneyland hotels. The occasion was BlizzCon, an annual two-day event put on by World of Warcraft's publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, in Anaheim. Twenty thousand tickets to the show sold out on the Internet in less than a minute on a Saturday in May.