exactly, the problem is that any time any of these articles come up there are the usual cries of 'look at agriculture! people were saying the sky was falling back then and it didn't, so it will not fall even this time'.

As you said

- robots are getting more and more capable
- humans are not getting more capable
- the number of humans needed for 'work' keeps decreasing
- the number of humans in the world keeps increasing
- political / economic / societal pressure is for a fixed amount of work per-person rather than a fixed total amount (so if less work is available less people will be able to work, vs the same people be able to all work for less time)

now how a logical person look at the above and not be concerned I have no idea. Up to now any sort of mechanization was very specific, a machine was invented that made a SPECIFIC job obsolete, the machines we are creating now are making whole CATEGORIES of jobs obsolete.

It's not like somebody invented a mechanical loom and weavers can say, oh well, we'll retrain and become bricklayers, we are inventing things so that any physical job you can do can be done better and faster by a machine, which means that if things keep going this way less and less people will be able to support themselves or their families by working a physical job. Some artisans still might, but they will be the best of the best, if you are an 'average' craftsmaker who will want to buy your product? let alone if you are a 'fair' one.

Current societal structure does not seem capable of dealing with a situation where 'work' is not as needed anymore, of course some people will still manage just fine (if you are at the top of your field, whatever your field is, you'll be ok), but if you are not at the top what are you going to do? Do people here honestly assume that if wages stay the way they are now you will be able to make a living wage by being a mediocre stand-up comedian? or a mediocre painter? or a mediocre musician? what are you going to do if there are no jobs available to you that mesh with your skills that can enable you to earn a living?

that's why likely it's the same RAW file 'developed' in camera raw for shadows / midtones / highlights and merged in PS with layers/masking to create a good HDR composite.

It really depends from the rules of the contest if the above is acceptable or not, but I don't consider it more cheating than dodging & burning in the darkroom...

I have played WOW off and on since just after release (coworker was in beta and kept asking me to try it, once it was released I joined and was hooked) but MOP has been the first patch I didn't resub for. Personally the best times for me were TBC (Karazhan with friends, occasionally getting in higher tier raids as a sub) vanilla (so many great memories) and wotlk up to ulduar more or less.

In a game that has millions of players there are millions of stories and millions of reasons of why players play or quit, these are why I am personally not subscribed (even if I wish I could be, if TBC was going on I'd be resubbing tomorrow)

- no sense of community: LFR, LFD and CRZ have completely killed any sense of community: since there is no downside for being abusive most people seem to be, in the old days if you ninjaed something in a dungeon run the other player(s) would message your guild leader and you got a talking to, if you did it more than once you got kicked out, or your guild could even end up being blacklisted so you would never PUG again. You met people while levelling and ran dungeons together, and form friendships which sometimes led to guilds, and sometimes to various PUG runs, and in general again to a sense of community.

- difficulty levels are out of whack: in the old days there were easy instances, and hard instances, you brought your not-as-competent friends to the easy instances and carried them a bit, and it was fine, and it was fun. Nowadays it's super easy heroics, brainless LFR, and hard raids where most fights have a 'one person not as good can kill everybody else's evening'. In the old days it was possible to carry people in raids too, just look at how many people died on average on the safety dance in 'bad guilds' or mixed the polarity, but still it was possible to down the boss if at least 2/3rds of the raid was competent. Yes, this meant that the 'super hardcore' had a bit of a snoozefest at times, but it also meant that a LARGE part of the subscribers could do the content as it was written.

Now it seems that 'see the content' means 'tune it so drooling on random keyboard keys makes the boss go down' while normal and heroic are tuned hard in terms of mechanics. That might be good for the hardcore, but not for the average player (I shy from the 'casual' label because just because somebody is not as good at the game as somebody else it doesn't make them not care, which 'casual' seems to imply).

- game seems focused towards more and more time invested: in the old days the minimum amount of time you needed to play on a daily basis to do content was not nearly as high as it is now. People with less available time were still able to contribute very well, if they had more time they either had more alts or they did some of the OPTIONAL grinds (black thorium, furbolgs, ...).

Nowadays if you can't put at least a few hours PER CHARACTER a day you're going to get left behind, because of the dailies, reps and so on. It seems that Blizzard listened to the loud cries of people with no life but the game that 'there isn't anything else to do' and so added more 'things to do' but also made them pretty much mandatory.

- design constraints shaped by non-game factors: many times reading GC's twitter replies you get some form of 'well, we could do xyz and give you this, or we could do this other thing and give you a lot more, we can't afford to do both' usually in the form of 'you either get a new raid or a new dungeon, and we think a new raid is a better investment of our money' or 'you either get 3 new scenarios or a new dungeon, and we think the scenarios are better'. It seems that vanilla/tbc were games where the design was the priority, not how much it cost to implement.

Complex problems have complex solutions, but if it was up to me for the next patch I would:

- keep LFR/LFD but make them REALM RESTRICTED, you get grouped ONLY with people on your realm
- remove CRZ entirely
- free transfers for everybody once every 3 months.
- rework heroic dungeon difficulties, have a progression where you have easy heroics, harder and hardest, where hardest is HARD (say, quel'danas when it first opened where the 'pvp boss' was really rough)
- remove dailies as a source of gear, dailies should be for cosmetic/profession/gold purposes only, NOT gear progression
- completely separate PVP/PVE in terms of skills, remove gearing from PVP entirely, just have cosmetic 'skins' but stats remain the same
- remove 'guild perks/reputation' or make them baseline
- put back group quests, long keying quests, attunements, but make them all soloable
- add 'tank' and 'healer' generic NPCs to dungeons so DPS can still get runs done if they really want to, but don't make them too good (make them only walk, say, and pull every group) so there is still a push towards having a 'real' dps/healer

basically I would try to go back to what made WOW a great game for me for the first few years

- a sense of community in the realm, the chance to make friends and get to know people
- a sense of progression, where dungeons and heroics are real stepping stones to raids, and even if you can't raid you can still get a lot of enjoyment off them
- a sense of the game wanting you to play so you can have more fun, vs the game being a job

anyways, this is long enough and it's not like Blizzard would listen to me anyways, but I thought I'd put it out there.

yes and no, conceptually they do go hand in hand (I personally always write unit tests for my own code), but you do need to have a completely separate person/team testing from the person/team developing, because you do not want to misdirect them ('oh, this works, it's this part that might have issues' and then it turns out there were issues in the 'this works' part that won't be tested as much due to your feedback).

You really need all 3 legs of the tripod to deliver quality software:

- the developer codes to spec and writes unit test
- the reviewer looks at the code, the spec and at the tests
- QA validates the program based on what the spec said the program should work like

of course this assumes that you have time to write the spec, to keep it up to date, to do code reviews, and to do a proper job of QA. All the time doing these tasks pays off in spades, but you do need buy-in from management to make them happen consistently.

I think you are forgetting that if the release date is set, and dev gets asked to work 70 hour weeks, you will have to do all the testing you were planning to do in a LOT less time once the devs are done, and if some critical bug ships guess who's going to be held responsible?

Testing can be as hard as development: it's not easy, for example, to develop and execute a test plan for a complex failover in a distributed system, and to be able to give to the developer a good repro case/setup so they can debug things if something went wrong.

Just like there is 'drudge work' QA there is also 'drudge work' development, but the skill ceiling can be as high in QA as in Dev, because in the end you can think of a strong QA engineer as a developer trying to produce software that will validate your product, which can be as hard as writing it in the first place as you need a very clear understanding of how it should work and why and how to try to make it fail.

Good QA people are worth their weight in gold for complex software, but finding them (and retaining them, and compensating them properly, and not outsourcing them) is not easy...

according to your 'sweet spot' theory maybe the sweet spot for me riding my bike would be 30mph (should take less energy to go 30mph than 20mph) oh, wait...

Your comparison to EPA is apples/oranges, just because you can get 34mpg at 70mph it does NOT mean that if you go 55mph you will get only 29mpg everything else being equal...

just because the speed limit is 80 it doesn't make it any more fuel efficient to go over 70...

The sound was OK but the music was crap

the music, which used iMuse, was actually great if you ran it to an outboard midi GM module (I used my Roland D5 keyboard at the time, which worked as it was compatible-ish with the MT-32 a lot of games back then supported), it was also awesome since it was midi it would seamlessly switch between "quiet" and "battle", I was really sad when games switched from that tech to CD tracks as the switch in that case it's a heck of a lot more noticeable.

With the available quality of virtual instruments nowadays I am a bit miffed that more games don't go for stems and mix things on the fly vs having fully produced tracks.