I would argue that while yes, they were recognized as atrocities, there was still a common expectation that massacres could and would happen during wartime. As a result of this general expectation, the Khan was never really looked at in any different light from those Assyrians you mentioned.

Hitler, however, behaved quite differently from his contemporaries. Only Stalin was quite that bloody. This illustrates a clear difference of the changing standards of the time, further reinforced by things like mass literacy and rapid communication of news.

To say that humans haven't changed requires ignoring a great deal of relative peace and prosperity. While we will likely never be done 100% completely with atrocities of different natures, simply reducing how common they are is an accomplishment that should not be ignored.

For a live service game like World of Warcraft there is no real way to experience it without supporting them, either monetarily or in their precious monthly active users metric they switched to after they stopped reporting on subscriber counts. In that kind of case the only real option is to walk away.

Aren't there still private servers available, or did they get those taken down via lawsuits/threats of lawsuits? Or did they kinda fade out after classic WoW became an official option? Regardless, you're right that with most live service games the only real option is to quit outright.

In that kind of case the only real option is to walk away.

I agree. I sucks sometimes, but it can also be a push to try new things or, specially if more people jump off, to recreate the good things of the old place in a new one (ehem..)

I'm not gonna downvote you (yet) because maybe I'm not getting your point right, and I think you didn't get mine which was the exact opposite to your third paragraph. I meant that no one's perfect, and when you idolize them you create expectation that no one can match so sooner or later they'll going to let you down.

Now not being perfect or 'pushing societal boundaries', which many would argue is one of the purposes or even a requirement of art, is not the same as being a complete piece of shit. I'm not supporting with my hard earned money or with publicity anyone who I know is gonna use it to abuse others, or to scam, or rapists... but I hope these where not the kind of 'creative minds' you were talking about, are they?

I can explain the idea, but I'll be honest, it took myself years of living in the dry world of maths, theoretical logic and computer science (+ likely autism) to truly get behind this one.

So, you probably know from maths that a function has inputs and outputs. You stick parameters into it and then it evaluates to a result.
With this model, the only way to change the output, is to change the inputs. A function cannot randomly decide that today, it's going to output something different.
Well, it can, but then the date (or whatever makes that day special) needs to be an input to the function.

There is no random, there's only pseudo-random, which is when it's really difficult to work out which inputs lead to a given output.

And I don't see a reason why our brain should magically be different from this. Our whole brain is a function. It's an extremely complex function, with gazillions of inputs throughout our lifetimes.
It's also not a pure function, as the outputs of future evaluations are influenced by the inputs of previous evaluations, a.k.a. we remember shit. And that remembering is fuzzy, too, as we only store certain statistical weights, like LLMs do.

So, there are a ton of sources for pseudo-randomness, meaning even for toddlers (who've experienced comparatively few inputs), it can already seem random why they are crying.
But I see no reason to believe that we've somehow acquired the only source of true randomness in the whole universe, let alone somehow a consciousness?/soul? which for whatever reason makes decisions not based on those inputs. That just sounds like terrible decision making to me.

I feel like people struggle to let go of this idea of free will, because so much of our philosophy, religion, laws, motivation etc. are based on it. Even for me, with my particular set of brain-weightings, I have to be quite aware of my thinking to not fall into traditional patterns.
Maybe the whole artificial intelligence shenanigans will make us realize that our own intelligence isn't that special.