What If Everybody Else Was a Bot?

I spent another hour last night fishing in Elwynn Forest. Not a lot going on last night, for the most part...

Except for that guy who literally flopped in the
water there, stayed for about a minute, and then
flew up and away.

And that one Hordie trying to pretend he's not
really there.

Oh, and there were people griping about duels and doing the same old "anything you can do I can do better" refrain, although here it's female toons beating up on male toons.

I was only partially fishing, as I was watching a few videos with interest, such as Pointy Hat's discussion of the D&D setting Ravenloft, its history, and the new D&D splatbook Ravenloft: The Horrors Within.*

Antonio Demico does a great job with his videos, and even this old D&D player learned a thing or two about the most well known Horror implementation in D&D.

But really what captured my attention was this video by Angelikatosh:

I have advocated for more NPCs in-game in the dead areas of Azeroth, but the concept of a WoW private server populated by ONE real person and over a thousand bots generated using Deepseek is taking things to a completely other level. 

And while I share Angelika's concerns about how this will impact our ability as humans to interact with each other, I do wonder whether we're already at that point. I mean, we're seeing the loss of attention spans and issues interacting with people of the opposite sex already**, so this is just a natural extension of those initial problems. 

It does remind me of my parents demanding that I turn off the television and go outside to, you know, go play. Sure, it could also mean interact with people, but I also spent significant amounts of time roaming the woods near our house by myself, riding my bike to play video games down at the local Kmart, or going to the library or the bookstore down the street. All of these activities were solo, but a few of them were at least out in the world where while I wasn't interacting with them directly, other people were present in the background. 

So, I'm not sure what to make of these private servers that people have cooked up. On the one hand, it could be fun having a thriving game world with more realistic NPCs, but on the other it could also be a prelude to a real life Westworld.

Oh, and for the record, I think I've found my new favorite spot to fish in Retail's Old World:

*I kept wanting to correct him that it's THE WAR WITHIN, but that's a "me" problem.

**Although to be fair, part of that stunted development could be laid at the feet of the pandemic.