It’s more like you’re having a kickabout in the park, and you and an opponent stop for a second to have a chat, then some guy on your team repeatedly slide tackles him shouting “Go Team!”. For years. And the park is the only place you can play. And you have to pay to go there.

I doubt the professor communicated much with the other players either (he could hardly explain himself without comprimising his study). In my experience players who talk less are more likely to receive abuse. On a TF2 server I frequent one player is one of the best I’ve ever played against, he never speaks, types once in a blue moon, barely does any teamwork and simply kills you, in the harshest and most abrupt ways possible, over and over again. He gets abuse, ahibet jokey abuse (someone once asserted he has no face) There’s another player even better than him, but he is freindly, chatty and joins in the fun. He is well liked.

If you act like a kill-bot, people will treat you like one.

I thought it was creepy too. I think the worst is the very first comment, especially after she clearly mentions in the interview that she is uncomfortable when people comment on her appearance in the context of her work. Also, the “how did you get this interview?” comes off as the commenter wanting to get hooked up with her.

1) Twixt wasn’t nearly as infamous as Dr. Myers claims; I’m sure he was much hated by the small PvP community on his home server (CoH does not have a large PvP community on any server). But I’ve been playing the game off and on since release, I know a lot of people there. I use the forums relatively regularly. The first I heard of this guy was following a link in the dev tracker on the forums to a thread about this article. There’s no question that he upset some people, but the claim that he was broadly known and hated across the game community is patently ridiculous. I don’t know anyone who’s ever even mentioned the guy, and from what I read on the message boards not too many people outside the server he played on were aware of him at all.

2) Teleporting other players into the guards is considered harrassment and is petitionable. I can’t quote chapter and verse, but I remember pretty clearly the developers saying some time ago that the main problem with it is that it’s difficult to enforce any rule against it, since their policy is that a customer service rep has to witness him doing it repeatedly to the same person. So while it’s not against the rules to do it once, and it’s easy to get away with doing it over and over again, to say that it’s within the intentions of the developers is asinine. There are several game mechanical functions that implicitly confirm this, but I’m not going to bore non-CoHers with the nuts and bolts of it.

In short, basically the guy is dishonest as well as a dick, and he’s trying to profit from it. Don’t make the mistake of taking him seriously.

Someone saiud upthread “being a dick is being a dick” which wouldn’t make much of a thesis but does get right to the heart of the matter.

Any action is only explicitly an ‘exploit’ if it is done through abusing bugs. Using game mechanics that are deemed unfair by other players is not exploiting.

I’d argue that the fault is that of the perpetrator, but the lack of repercussion (and consequently the repetition of the act) is on the developers. I wouldn’t be surprised if their failure to respond to this exploit cost them some subscription money…