I don't think there is any evidence that there would be less players in wow if they never introduced that feature, on the contrary there are plenty of things pointing in the opposite direction.

The thing with games is that the box price is extremely under what consumers value them, so selling consumers small bits of the game as micro transactions is the way games extract their actual market value. It doesn't deliver more value than before, but the current monetization better represents the value it delivers to consumers.

Passing math classes requires almost no understanding at all btw, even getting good grades in them doesn't.

There aren't a lot of people that can make or lead a team to make world class products, but the number of marketing mangers who are exceptional enough to have significant impact on your company aren't that many either.

That is branded as a convenience feature though, it is very convenient to buy a maxlevel character or buy gold.

> We totally do emulate organisms on that scale. The

There is no evidence those emulations actually emulates those organisms. They just built a neural net in the same structure and assumes the cells doesn't matter. But cells are really smart and can navigate environments on their own, they are intelligent beings in their own right, and building a flea using a thousand of those is very plausible compared to doing it using neural net of similar size.

And yes, in order to prove that we actually emulated those you need to show that it does the same things in the same scenarios. You don't even need to do everything, just a simple thing like being able to move around, gather material and build a home in a physics engine would be huge.

That isn't clear at all that, right now is very different from a month ago. Final fantasy 14 could possibly be larger and if it isn't will very likely dethrone wow as the biggest mmorpg in the near future.

Also I am significantly more afraid of crazy shit that people don't call crazy than crazy shit everyone calls crazy.

Edit: The main point is that nobody can say that San Francisco has less money with those tech companies operating there than they would if those tech companies left. They are among the richest places on earth and should easily be afford any measures that can be afforded anywhere.

So how would you quantify "good" or "bad"? You can't unless you also answer what "good" + "bad" should be. In psychology they just assume that mapping those onto 1 and 5 makes sense, so "good" + "bad" = 5 + 1 = 6, but that doesn't make sense since it would imply that "good" is the same as "bad" + "bad" + "bad" + "bad" + "bad". You get similar but different issues if you start including negative numbers, or if you just use relative measures and don't have a proper zero, no matter what you do numbers doesn't properly represent feelings as we know them.