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The "Ellie" controversy in the pro Overwatch scene

Recently video game journalists got a really juicy piece of story: The top ranks of professional Overwatch players are very heavily male-dominated. A rare female player started raising the ranks, and was accepted into one of the top teams, but the other teams as well as the Overwatch community started harassing her online, claiming that she was just a fake and so on, to such an extent that she had to quit.

Oooh wow! This is so juicy! A clear case of misogyny in the gaming community! Journalists get to write the word "gamergate" a couple of dozen times once again! What an orgastic feeling for these journalists. All of their activism has been vindicated!

Well, it quite soon turned out that she was indeed a fake. While "Ellie" was indeed a real person (not named like that), it wasn't her who was actually playing, but it was one or more of the top pro players doing it in her name. When some people who knew about the ruse leaked the information, the people responsible for this admitted to it, and said that it was "a social experiment" (although, if I understand correctly, without going into more details about what its purpose was.)

But that doesn't really matter, right? Social experiment or not, sock puppet account or not, it still went to show the extreme misogyny and hatred of female players in the gaming community! The people who harassed her did not know that it was a fake. They thought it was a real female players, and this whole thing just shed light on the rampant misogyny of gamers! The points are still valid!

Right?

Well, no.

Like always, opportunistic self-serving leftist activist journalists cannot be trusted to have a single honest bone in their body, and they will conveniently ignore the context for the sake of advancing their ideological agenda.

Overwatch is a very, very competitive form of e-sport. The top players all know each other, and the most avid fans also know all the top players. The top players are, in a way, celebrities among the Overwatch community, especially those who follow the top e-sport leagues.

Now, if suddenly a completely unknown nobody, who nobody has ever heard of before, and has no known history nor presence in the Overwatch e-sport community or anywhere else, and nobody knows anything about, starts very quickly raising in the ranks way to the top, out of nowhere, that's going to raise eyebrows.

Overwatch is not a game where you just get astonishingly good, reaching the top ranks, in a few weeks. It requires a very large amount of practice. So who is this person who seemingly out of nowhere started raising the ranks faster than anybody else?

People started very quickly suspecting it was one of the top pro players in disguise, using a so-called "smurf" account, or "sock puppet" account. In other words, just some top player created a new anonymous account and started playing with it, pretending to be someone else.

This isn't a small deal at the top levels of Overwatch (or in any form of e-sport or hobby that's so competitive).

That is what all the "harassment" was all about: People were convinced that this was a hoax. Someone pretending to be someone else. And of course it turned out that they were completely right. It was a hoax. It was some top player (or players) pretending to be this new player behind the scenes.

The "harassment", if we can even call it that, wasn't because she was apparently a female player. It was because there was a very strong suspicion that it was a fake, a hoax, in an extremely competitive hobby, where top players are famous and kept in very high regard.

But of course leftist journalists don't care about any of that. They only want a juicy story to confirm their ideology.

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