Extrapolating optimization

Different blogs / bloggers have different styles, often contributing to the same discussion in very different ways. One of the blogs I read regularly is Killed in a Smiling Accident, a blog specialized in a more humorous, satirical style of expression. And I must say Melmoth really nailed it in his contribution to the optimization discussion: If we say that it is better to use an optimized build, gear, spell rotation, and boss strategy from the internet than trying to figure out those things by ourselves, then why take the next step and make a bot program from the internet do the execution as well?

Going even further, I would rather play a game where I do the strategic and tactical decisions, and the actual combat is completely automated. I used to play board games like RoboRally or Diplomacy that worked like that: The players made all the decisions, wrote them down, and then the hidden commands were all revealed at the same time, and the execution performed without further input from the players. That should be even easier to implement in a computer game.

Now some people will say that the execution *is* the game in a MMORPG like World of Warcraft. But if that is the case, then why do we have things like talent trees and different spell choices in the game?

Thought experiment: If you slowed down the execution part of a game down by a factor of 10, would it still be fun? I believe that raiding in WoW fails that test: The decisions you take during raid encounters are often completely trivial and uninteresting, like whether to stand in the fire or not. If you had lots of time to execute your moves, the moves itself would be far too boring to interest anybody.