James Hogan wrote at least one hard science fiction novel dealing with downloading minds into a virtual world. Went into the limitations and the hook ups. For instance you'd have no sense of smell due to it being pretty much a direct connection inside the brain. The thing I found most interesting is that because your brain can operate far faster, especially when hooked into a computer, than your meat body can, you can process data two hundred times faster, in his world. so an hour in the real world would be two hundred in the virtual world. I don't think you're taking into account how petty some people can be. We're not talking the population in general. I can assure you that if this were a real thing there would be people who'd want to troll other players/real people. Think of the people who will wreck a webpage for no other reason than that they can. It's just an option. There can be threads where the entire world centers around them, and everyone else is an NPC. Mind you, they'd want to make the NPC as close to real as possible, otherwise you're just talking slightly more sophisticated silicone dolls.
