Funny thing is... I've been in groups where this isn't a heel move. Heck, I was once in a campaign where I and other players were involed in a long con to back stab the rest of the party at the DM's behest. (No hard feelings because it was to set up the characters we were using as future big bad guys, rather than screw over the party.)

Still, LOVE the dead silence in the last panel except for '<Rolls>'.

I was wondering how they were going to set up this fight

If it weren't this guy, it could even not be a heel move here, since this is to set up a fight between Luffy and Zoro, something they actually sort of want to do. But since this guy is trying to hurt people, it looks bad.
Though technically he did get permission to do it from Zoros player

In the right party, inter-party conflict can be fun. And considering the Mihawk/Zoro fight, I'd say this is the right kind of party for it

While a dick move it’s in of itself not a ooc one.

That merc would and did IC try and trick luffy into fighting zorro. And if this was the DM doing this I’m sure both would actually applaud this power move.

And technically his character was brought in as a hostile force and he IC never really got a reason to help them. I’ve had at least one guy in my DND group before whom played so IC that he more offen then not wound up parallel with the party rather then with the party and did actally fight the party because of that.

And I myself turned against the party for IC reasons once as well.

Here it’s a dick move made out of spite but the move itself is not a bad one. It’s just being made for the wrong reasons

Well, given that this one's supposed to be loyal to mr.9, is it really in character for him to try and get luffy to help the two guys who nearly killed mr.9?

Also, earlier comics showed him refusing opportunities to be in a less hostile standing with the rest of the party, IIRC. It's not like he was thrust into this situation, he actively made his way there.

The problem with your logic is that that guy doesn't even know about anything that happened after he got messed up by Zoro... And even if he did know, he might still be more terrified of the strawhats because they pose a serious threat to his life while the other two agents are merely there to punish his immediate superior.

There are plenty of motivations to set up this fight.

GM explicitly said this grunt was loyal to Mr.9 and had seen the way Mr.9 sacrificed himself to protect Miss Wednesday from Mr.5 and Miss Valentine.

The implication,therefore, was clearly that he should feel obligated to do the same (either to avenge Mr.9 or to finish his objective), and the best way to do that would be to set Luffy against them, not trying to trick Luffy into thinking they were on his side (even if that ends up not really effecting anything canonically as Luffy ignores them entirely for Zoro).

There is no arguing "it's what my character would do" when it's in direct opposition to the motivation/background provided when the GM handed said character to you. The only reason it flies at all is because we know he and Luke had talked about it beforehand.

of course the bounty hunters here were all knocked out before mr 5 and valentine showed up- Mr. 9 could argue the guy is refering to 9 and wednesday- because the bounty hunter actually DOESN'T know those two were already beaten

I’m not saying the player isn’t an ass.

I’m saying that the GM could have and probably should have done this exact move.

"...one of one's loyal..."
Pretty sure there needs to be a "the" in front of "one's".

I remember that we once had to player that really wanted to check who is stronger.

In the end we just gave them 2 hours to "fight it out" outside of the campaign and without any consequences like "You are now dead".

Result: 2 vs. 2 - both respected the other character afterwards and we could concentrate on the campaign without this whole "Who is the strongest" competion...