So Slashdot picked up a piece from nola.com about “the most hated outcast in City of Heroes”, pretty well summarised as “Researcher Trolls MMO, Surprised When Players Hate Him”. Course it’s a bit more complex than that, Massively have a good bunch o’ links to launch off across various forums, blogs etc.

From the good prof’s paper, there is the conclusion:

Remaining likable – socially connected — within the CoH/V community meant playing the game according to values other than those made explicit by the game design and the game designers. Players could only learn these values – much like those affecting social activities in the real world — by becoming (or already being) a member of the game’s entrenched social order.

Is that a bit of a “Pope in ‘not protestant’ shocker” for anyone who’s played an MMO for more than a couple of days? Pick an MMO of choice (except EVE, yada yada, exception that proves rule and all that, and probably Darkfall and its ilk too), can you come up with behaviour that, to use a technical term, would be “acting like a dick” but not explicitly “illegal”/disallowed to the point you’d get a warning/ban? As a starter for ten: in a game with Need/Greed loot rolling, persistently rolling “Need” on absolutely everything tends to be a good way of losing friends and not influencing people. Bonus example: The Ancient Gaming Noob’s mysterious scenario and reveal, with accompanying rather interesting debate. Any others?