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by asphyxiac 2050 days ago
OP, based on the Screeps thread, we have a purported Steam profile for MH. Did that yield anything?

Edit: I know that folks thought this was a red herring. Checked the steam profile, power player badge was unlocked on 10/23 but Recently Played shows nothing (might be privacy settings) and last review was 3 years ago. Do badges ever auto-unlock, or could this person have shared a steam account?
4 comments
fuzxi 2050 days ago
>Do badges ever auto-unlock

That specific badge is for game ownership. I believe it's possible for games to be added to your account automatically in some cases (like an HD version given out for free to existing owners) which could unlock the badge without user intervention.

>or could this person have shared a steam account?

Definitely possible as well.

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chaostheory 2050 days ago
With an all time peak of 357 players playing at a time, Screeps is still the best lead especially when you link it to a Steam account.

https://steamcharts.com/app/464350

Hopefully, the developer still has logs and data for 2018 and earlier

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tedivm 2050 days ago
That number is way off- the steam client came out well after the website version (they both connect to the same MMO server), and there are a lot of users who just use the website to play the game.

The community- with the admins- put a lot of work into trying to figure this out. I lead a group who does analysis of other people's codebases by scraping data from the game, as a way to identify unique codebases (and players who use open source bots). The admins went through logs and we all poured through the game history looking for anything that might match up.

The problem is that it looks like he may never have played the MMO. Besides having the shared server the game is also open sourced. It's extremely common for players to run either in the simulator or on their own private server while testing out their codebase. Looking at his journals (and a journalist did share copies of everything they had with us) I really feel that he was in the early draft phase thinking about the game but not actually playing yet on the shared server.

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chaostheory 2050 days ago
This is terrible news.

It’s great though how both the developer and community came together to help ID the guy.

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stevehawk 2050 days ago
Ya. There was a game that unlocked a badge one year after your purchase for no reason than the anniversary of it
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anotheryou 2049 days ago
According to this https://steamid.uk/profile/76561198004426967 the friends are mostly canadian.

But it also says that one friendship is just 280 days old or something.

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