Given that he seems to be able to read the flow of people well, I think he normally picks his battles. I think he's being particularly provocative here given that he's interested in Maomao and that he is leveraging the fact that he knows Jinshi's status. (Honestly Jinshi could just outright ignore him if this wasn't the case).
I'm guessing that by "My provocation was unsuccessful" he means that he wasn't able to make Jinshi/Maomao fail and have them approach him for the answer or something.