[glurgh]

This seems like an oddly reductive take, to me. It's possible to appreciate the pluck and ingenuity while being utterly dismayed by the lack of judgement and self-reflection. And this dismay need not come purely from some misplaced urge for opprobrium.

His broken moral compass and naive sense of entitled victimhood are preventing him from leveraging his talents to find the kind of work that he wants. You can easily be misguidedly "relentlessly resourceful". Just like you can be both fascinated and saddened to see it happen.

[dang]

I agree with your first paragraph. It's not only possible to see multiple sides to this, it's sane. But you may have missed my point, which is that comments in the thread tended to take one side or the other.

Your second paragraph, I think, goes way too far. I don't believe you have nearly enough information to make that judgment. In fact, you can't have it, because it mostly depends on what the author learns (or doesn't learn) from his mistakes, which means it depends on the future.

[glurgh]

On rescanning the thread, you probably right about the first bit.

And we are definitely reacting to each others' notions of how bothered one ought to be by his behaviour.

'Broken moral compass' may be a little harsh but I think you are perhaps swayed too far by the display of resourcefulness and the 'virtualness' and triviality of the setting. I'd see it differently if he were a 14 year old kid, figuring out how the world works. But he's an adult (with a spouse and a mortgage) who more or less tried to extort the developers of the mmorpg into giving him a job. This seems like sufficient information to conclude that he has rather poor ethical judgement or at least, a great deal of ethical obliviousness.

It reminds me a bit of a part of 'Reflections on Trusting Trust' that is rarely cited or recalled - open it up when you have a chance and re-read the last three paragraphs of the last section 'Moral'.