To correct your analogy: imagine a world in which humans needed to be constantly told their math skills were awesome (I don't know, maybe as confidence building for middle-school girls). In this world, we might have calculators which were designed to provide the wrong answer, so that people would type in 36 x 50, get -7 as the answer, and say "Hah, I'm much better at this than you are."
In this world, which parallels the MMORPG use case, yes, its cheaper to keep a calculator to be the whipping boy than to keep around a human who has been instructed to perform math poorly.
I was trying to demonstrate that while the conclusion (use AI because they lose cheaper than it costs to get humans to lose) is not false, it is far too broad to be of any use. I can draw that same conclusion for any tool that humans have used to automate a task.
The idea that the tool's purpose is to lose is tangential.
And I dispute that. AFAIK, the AI in WoW is not designed to lose. A monster will kill you (win) if it gets the chance. The monster is trying to win (the AI is designed to win), it just isn't very good (the game is designed so you win the majority of individual battles).
And I don't think you can make the jump from "the game is designed so that you win the majority of individual battles" to "the game is not challenging". Doing so infers that "only games designed so that you do not win the majority of individual battles are challenging".
And since the basis for the PVP argument is undermined, it is a waste of time to consider it (regardless of whether it may be true or not).
The reasoning followed from flawed beginnings to a uselessly broad conclusion.
PS. I did intend to post something more thorough the first time, but I ran out of time and pressure posted only a snippet of my incomplete ramblings.
The point isn't to make it lose (that would be easy), the point is to barely lose. Human psychology thrives on tasks that are challenging but conquerable. Losing sucks, trivial challenges suck, so game AI has to be somewhere in between.
In this world, which parallels the MMORPG use case, yes, its cheaper to keep a calculator to be the whipping boy than to keep around a human who has been instructed to perform math poorly.