This isn’t a smoking gun.

You can’t trust that ChatGPT is telling the truth, but also the use of copyrighted material is acceptable under a fair use standard written into US copyright law. Whether it is fair use or not is up to a court to decide, but “without permission” doesn’t automatically mean “illegally.”

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.

It might be similar to a song you’ve heard but you’re misremembering the notes of the existing song.

Maybe try playing it for an app that recognizes the song that’s playing and then listen to any songs it guesses might be the song.

This is a decent one, but a ton of the HFY stories are just so problematic. Many just feel like they’re congratulating humanity on being vicious and creatively violent, like they think the Terran Empire in the Star Trek Mirror Universe were good guys.

Otherwise, a bunch just feel lazily formulaic and repetitive with others. Take a random human trait or convention from a human culture like say…fried foods. Use an alien narrator to describe how weird they think it is to fry foods. Find an angle to portray humans as plucky and great for their fierce devotion to frying foods and involve it in a narrative about humanity winning against greater odds. “And the human just dumped the entire chargizoid corpse into a vat of boiling oil! And then he took it out with something called tongs and ate it, skin and all! And that’s when I knew I needed humans on my side in the coming galactic war…”

I guess I feel like the subgenre plays on the optimism of Star Trek utopianism, but ditches any real criticism of humanity’s past (or our present). I think the message from Orville’s Season 3 Episode 10 about what made humanity better in their past is a better heir to Star Trek utopianism than most of the HFY stories I’ve read.

even their title is creepy, Human Resources

The only appropriate use of the term is when your cat is talking about you to other cats…