Hence the desire for a single player offline version of the game…

Not everyone believes that devs are the authority on what makes a game fun, which is why mods are so common on PC games.

but that’s part of it, just like irl.

Some people might not want annoying aspects of IRL in their fantasy escapism games involving roleplay…

That’s the part I always hated. It was hostile towards people who liked the lore but didn’t want to group up with some guy named LaserButt4000 who didn’t want to go to the same dungeon as you, but was happy to get your rare loot in a bad roll of the dice.

Private servers with scaling for dungeon soloing were a godsend. WoW is actually awesome as a single player game. It’s unfortunate the devs never realized that.

Add time tracking for time tracking with every other task.

Top down design of protocols by a security- and privacy-conscious organization rather than leaving security to corporations as a side item or PR campaign topic when their primary focuses are marketing, advertising, data collection, and intellectual property.

This is less of an issue if you judge everything that isn’t first hand from a known friend or family member as suspect or at least just a waste of time. Facebook used to be a place to talk to people you knew in the real world. You could ignore anything they reposted and still engage with the actual examples of their own experiences that they posted. But now it’s so flooded with ads and listicles and clickbait and video clips that it’s not even worth trying to keep up with the people you actually know.

It’s still not stealing. It’s plagiarism or fraud or any number of other terms, but stealing necessarily requires the deprivation of a limited, rivalrous thing, like money or property. You can’t steal fame or exposure or credit, except poetically. And by that point, the word becomes so watered down that it’s meaningless. You might as well say I’m stealing your life seconds at a time by writing this extra sentence.

The purpose of using the term stealing here is only to borrow the negative moral connotations of the term, but it doesn’t communicate clearly what exactly is happening.

It’s perfectly valid to say you consider it morally equivalent with theft, but it’s not stealing.

I sincerely appreciate that WSJ thinks their propaganda is so important that I’d want to pay to read it.