Into this toxic storm came Ellie.

Ellie — no last name given — appeared at first to be a previously undiscovered, highly ranked female player who’d seemingly come out of nowhere to dominate the Overwatch leader boards. As such, she was a tempting recruit for the Contenders team Second Wind, which, according to a statement released this month, had found itself “desperately” in need of a new player to fill a hole in its roster.

Ellie, however, proved reticent to reveal anything about her identity other than her online alias . Some fans argued that she did so with good reason: The e-sports world has an ugly history of haranguing female players to the breaking point. In 2015, for instance, Hyerim Lee, a professional competitor known as MagicAmy in another popular game, Hearthstone, was accused by a fellow player of being nothing more than a pretty face and a front for an anonymous man or team of players. These accusations led to an investigation; Ms. Lee was vindicated and her employer, the team Tempo Storm, offered to “support MagicAmy in an attempt to clear her name.” However, in the wake of the negative attention, Ms. Lee opted to retire from professional play instead.

In 2016, another professional player — this time an Overwatch specialist — named Kim Se-yeon and known as Geguri, also faced charges of cheating from her male competitors, though in her case she was accused of simply hacking the game itself, not of having a man play for her. At least two players were so confident that she must have been pulling the wool over the community’s eyes that they staked their careers on it, promising not only to apologize but also to retire from the league if they were proved wrong. To their credit, they did so following a live-streamed event where she demonstrated her preternatural mouse skills for all to see.

So there was reason enough for Ellie to want to keep her identity a secret, and Second Wind indicated it would respect Ellie’s desire for privacy. Others, however, remained suspicious and soon enough the cycle of harassment, abuse, threats and calls for doxxing began. (Doxxing is the online practice of publishing people’s personal, private information without their consent.) Not long after, Ellie announced that she would not be playing for Second Wind after all. It seemed as though yet another female e-sports athlete had been driven away from the scene.

But this time, the story had a twist. Soon after her early retirement was announced, another highly accomplished but as yet undrafted Overwatch player calling himself Punisher confessed to a fellow player that he was, in fact, the man behind the Ellie persona and that the entire fiasco was intended to function as a kind of “social experiment.” In other words, it turned out that Ellie really had been lying about her identity all along.