After sleeping on this, I finally figured out what was bothering me about the massive number of responses here claiming that this Professor was being clueless.

After sleeping on this, I finally figured out what was bothering me about the massive number of responses here claiming that this Professor was being clueless. The basic assumption is that the Professor was griefing other players. He wasn't. From the article, it did not appear as if he had the intent to deliberately harass and annoy other players. Instead, he was merely ignoring social customs and determining the best PvP strategies from there. Further, he was attempting to conduct a study. I am assuming (big assumption) that he was at least trying to be objective. In other words, there is nothing personal in what he was doing. The stunning results isn't that there were people who backlashed at him so much as that, he perceived his actions as being impersonal, yet it seems many of the people on CoH ... and here on Hacker News ... perceive his actions as griefing. What is profound here is that this false perception generated an incredible amount of backlash. It is the same mechanism used in witchhunts. It looks like crowd sourcing has a downside too. It implies that people still don't stop and consider whether the other person was doing it out of ignorance or simply because that other person ignores social conventions. The aggravation generated by this snowballs because people want something to blame. What is also interesting to me is how otherwise intelligent people automatically reacts to their own irritation.