Twin Galaxies recently reported on the news that Overwatch Contenders player “Ellie” had recently decided to step down from her team, Second Wind, in the wake of harassment from the community and other players. While much of the harassment was aimed at the fact that the account was relatively fresh and featured very similar characteristics to another top amateur player, “Punisher”, a fair portion of the abuse was directed to the fact that “Ellie” was a female player, and therefore not fit to be an Overwatch pro.

Now, the situation has become even murkier, with recent news that “Ellie” is in fact a fake account, likely run by “Punisher”. News broke not long ago from several sources that indicate that “Ellie” is a fake account created as a “social experiment” by “Punisher”, though for what purpose we can only imagine.

Regarding Ellie:



- Ellie has said in private messages to teammates in the last hour confirming she has not been the one playing, she is a 17-year old girl but is 'not good' at OW, no Second Wind players/mgmt knew

- Blizzard is currently holding a meeting with SW players/mgmt — Rod Breslau (@Slasher) January 4, 2019

Rod “Slasher” Breslau tweeted the news, stating: “Regarding Ellie: - Ellie has said in private messages to teammates in the last hour confirming she has not been the one playing, she is a 17-year old girl but is 'not good' at OW, no Second Wind players/mgmt knew - Blizzard is currently holding a meeting with SW players/mgmt.”

While “Aspen”, a female streamer for Cloud9, revealed on her stream that "Ellie is actually Punisher, and he told me yesterday… He did this for like a social experiment thing, and did not expect it to get out of hand, so that's kinda the juice around that."

Neither Second Wind, “Punisher”, or Blizzard have made a statement regarding the situation as yet, however this doesn’t paint a particularly good light on the team or Overwatch Contenders as a whole. If the organization knew about this beforehand, why would they think adding a fake player to their roster was a good idea, and if they didn’t know, why would they add a player to their team without verifying their credentials first. It seems that this particular story isn’t quite as finished as some may have hoped.