Blizzard Confirms Second Wind Player "Ellie" Was False Identity
By Zac Cameron ·
The latest drama saga to strike Overwatch has finally been commented on by Blizzard Games themselves, as the "Ellie" account is proven to be fake.
Blizzard have finally weighed in on the “Ellie” controversy plaguing the Overwatch community, and the news isn’t looking good for any of the people involved. In a statement to Dot Esports, a Blizzard spokesperson revealed that the “Ellie” account is in fact a fake identity.
“After investigating the matter, we found that ‘Ellie’ was a fabricated identity and is a smurf account—created by a veteran player to obfuscate their identity,” an Overwatch esports spokesperson told Dot Esports. “The owner of Ellie’s account is a player with no current or prior involvement with any Overwatch Contenders or Overwatch League team. ‘Ellie’ was never formally submitted to the active roster of Second Wind and never played in a Contenders match. As part of the process to officially add a player to a Contenders or Overwatch League roster, we do background checks to ensure that players are who they say they are as well as meet other eligibility requirements, and will take action against players if we discover any behavior that warrants it.”
Additionally, the team “Ellie” was supposed to play on, Second Wind, have released their own statement on the matter.
Official statement regarding Ellie from Second Wind management
— Second Wind (@SecondWindGG) January 5, 2019
Read: https://t.co/iYv7jXy01n
“As soon as Ellie was announced, many questions came up regarding the legitimacy of the player. We reached out to Blizzard early on to help verify their identity and calm the suspicions about our newest player, doing the best we could for the time being. During this time, we worked with Ellie to improve their public presence by prepping them for interviews, streams, and encouraging an environment where they could play with other team members publicly,” revealed the team in their statement released on Twitlonger. “This unfortunately fell through due to Ellie opting out for “personal reasons” we did not want to press them for. Ellie began receiving doxxing and personal threats due to their anonymity. In a bid to respect Ellie’s request for privacy, we contacted Blizzard about not having their name published on the Contenders website. As a team, we admit we handled this poorly. More could have been done to support our players, but we had found ourselves unprepared for the attention Ellie got upon their onboarding; we had full faith in them. Due to our desperation to fill a roster, we unfortunately overlooked crucial information that should have been paid more attention to. We did not properly allocate enough time to communicate with the public as a means to support our players, and as a result caused more questioning that could have been avoided.”
As for what comes now, it remains to be seen whether any players or even Second Wind will face any consequences for this debacle. Regardless of the reasoning behind the decision to create this fake persona, it seems the lasting legacy will be yet another nasty bruise on the professionalism of Overwatch as a whole.