Steganographic attempts are considered foiled if someone can detect that there is a secret message, they don't need to be able to retrieve the message in order for the attempt to be considered a failure. I did my Master's project on hiding data in the least significant bitplane of imagery. The trick is to "randomly" scatter your secret message throughout this plane. I showed methods that would allow you to do this so that the data was indistinguishable. You should always encrypt your secret message first so that it looks random, or better yet, shape the statistics of your encoded message to match the noise characteristics that were in the original LSB plane. If you use an image created from a very noisy source, such as a digital camera, and you encrypt the embedded message and scatter it using a reversible algorithm, and iteratively ensure that the statistics of the altered LSB plane look the same as the original LSB plane, I proved that it is not possible for someone to tell that there is a secret message hidden there. However, you need to be careful to use an original image you created yourself, and to destroy the original, because if someone ever compared the original to the one with the embedded message, they could definitely tell there was something altered by comparing the LSB planes.

I used to think that these solo player RPGs and multiplayer adventure games could be timesinks. Then I played the persistent MMORPGs....

There is no comparison. The other day I ran into someone in Everquest whose name was an odd Gold color. It turns out that is the reward for 500 days played... That's 500 realtime days, or 12,000 RL hours playing one character.