It's not up to you to decide how people should enjoy a game, is it? If the majority of the players feel that someone's behavior is impacting their enjoyment then arguably you are in the wrong, as after all, people sign on to the game to have fun, and being killed without defense is probably not fun to most people. So, whether it was explicitly allowed by some written rules somewhere, arguably his behavior was counterproductive to the aims of the customers and I'm surprised the company let him get away with it as long as he did.
In one MMO game I've played, they had very strict rules about this sort of behavior. Essentially, their position was that "if you, through a bug or glitch or undocumented function find yourself being able to do things that you arguably should have figured out was not intended, and you take advantage of this in the game, you are subject to a lifetime ban without warning."
If you play a PvP game and/or go into a PvP zone, expect PvP. If you keep getting beat by someone who is playing by the rules, then get better. If there's still no way for you to beat them, then it's on the game developers to balance the game. It's that simple.
I suppose you are of the opinion that screwing over other people IRL also is all right, as long as it's legal? I mean, if it wasn't meant to be done, then it would be illegal, right?
But it wasn't PvP. The professor took advantage of the invincible NPCs at the ends of the area to kill the other players.
If he had simply been a bully, picking on weaker players, the situation would have been different. The professor was exploiting a loophole in the structure of the game provoke a reaction from other players.
He broke a social contract, not a game play mechanic.
It's like fat people walking down the middle of a narrow hallway; there is not explicit rule that prohibits that. But they are still breaking implicit rules which pisses people off.
PS: People don’t clearly separate games from real life. If you follow to closely to an avatar in an MMO for to low it will also bug people.
The means by which Myers was winning did nothing to establish himself as a skilled player. People were not using his strategy precisely because it required no skill. Myers was not using the area as intended but rather abusing a loophole (that was later closed by the game admins).
They signed up to play heroes vs villains. That's what they got. They wanted to farm experience points and socialize, but it was harder than they wanted it to be because someone else was following the rules and using their own skills to defeat them.
The rules of the game, in this case, are essentially the bill of rights, protecting the minority from the majority. The majority appealed and got some changes to the rules, but the fundamentals mostly stayed the same, and individual players can continue playing as the professor did, if they wish, regardless of the desire of other players to conduct boring activities like build up points by killing NPCs.
Perhaps the people who want to do this safely should petition the developer for some NPC-killing only zone. Oh, but then the game would really be ruined. LOL, there's got to be some danger to simply building up points in a game like this.
I really wish more people would question the damage being done by this type of common but fantasy-killing majority behavior to the original intent and storyline in MMO games.
In one MMO game I've played, they had very strict rules about this sort of behavior. Essentially, their position was that "if you, through a bug or glitch or undocumented function find yourself being able to do things that you arguably should have figured out was not intended, and you take advantage of this in the game, you are subject to a lifetime ban without warning."