Qwerty is not the savior we want or deserve

He should have been gone as soon as it emerged that he'd been PMing people fishing for their fucking accounts. When you think about it, it's absolutely nuts that no action was taken over that. Here's a guy who has tried to trick people into telling him their account names. Mull that over for a moment and tell me where else on the internet such a thing would be allowed? I realize there's no monetary gain involved, it's not like he's hacking people's accounts and selling them, but it's still egregious enough to warrant an automatic ban.

Presumably he was connecting forum users to their game accounts. There was a screenshot of a PM where he claimed to be "looking into" some issue and asked for the poster's account name. Incidentally, this was right around the time of the IP-tracking pixel shit. The motive isn't the point. I don't care if he was just setting up a tier list of the prettiest account names for his own amusement. You don't go around anonymously trying to talk people into telling you their account names. It's one of those things you Just Don't Do. Don't compare it to you voluntarily telling people your account name, that's fucking stupid and you know it.

DON'T DO IT GUYS! DON'T DO IT! IF YOU PUNISH QWERTY, YOU'LL BECOME JUST LIKE HIM! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I am disappointed in Qwerty. I didn't know about the pixel tracking or any of that nonsense. I guess I don't keep as up to date as I should on these forums.

Seriously @qwerty

Because the IP address alone is not a reliable way to identify someone, can get false positives?

I'm not saying that was him, we still don't really know the scope of that stunt; but a few years ago, the profile shik emerged and started posting short, inconspicuous replies to threads, the kinds of replies that don't evoke any kind of response or anything. Just "Awesome" and "LOL" and such. They were also PMing people with similarly benign stuff like "I agreed with your post." It was later discovered that an IP-tracking pixel was embedded in their signature. Nergal has recently mentioned that Seidhr and Adhira had set up some IP-tracking scheme with spreadsheets and everything, so it was likely part of that, but we can't know if shik was their plant or someone else inspired to try the same thing here.

The Qwerty account was registered very shortly after this pixel thing was discovered. There was a big thread about it on TMS or TMC or one of those sites. I recall that a bunch of people posted saying that it was completely absurd to even insinuate that staff could have been behind such a thing, and blasting insults at anyone who pointed out that they've had a history of trying to identify this forum's users and stopping them from posting here. Turns out it was some of the game's most senior admins behind it lmao. And I suspect that Qwerty's presence here is, or at least started as, a similar kind of scheme to sniff out shadowboarders and fuck around with this community. Anyone who thinks he's here in good faith is an idiot.