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Chinese Indie Developer Doxxed and Harassed by Extreme ‘Genshin Defenders’

798 View2022-11-28

On November 15th, indie game developer “狸子Neazle” uploaded a video about how his privacy had been violated and he was being spammed by extreme Genshin enthusiasts.

Neazle is an indie game developer, and his latest product is a Tabletop RPG replay generation tool called “活字引擎”. The tool has received a Very Positive review rating among Chinese Tabletop RPG players.

In the video, Neazle showed that there were people sending offensive comments with Neazle’s real name during his live stream. Later on, Neazle’s mobile phone was spammed by thousands of verification SMS. Neazle reported this to the platform and called the police after that, but it seems they did not feel it warranted their intervention.

A screenshot of Neazle’s video shows his privacy had been violated by multiple attackers.

According to Neazle, he believes the attackers belong to the infamous extreme Genshin enthusiast group “Xianjiajun” (仙家军, which means the army of Adeptus). The Army of Adeptus is known as an extreme group of Genshin defenders that will attack people online if they believe those people are a “harm to the game”. A common attack pattern is to steal the person’s private info and spread it publicly (doxxing), and then spam the victim with endless direct messages or comments.

The Army of Adeptus usually uses sarcastic tones with special cants in their message to avoid being filtered or banned but still bring discomfort to the victim. In fact, Neazle’s Weibo and Bilibili accounts are still receiving these kinds of hostile comments at this moment.

A screenshot of the spam comments sent toward Neazle.

Though frustrated, Neazle claimed he was not beaten by the attacks and kept posting his latest moments in an optimistic tone as a way to fight back.

Some believe that “the Army of Adeptus” represent a defensive measure by some Genshin communities against haters and cutthroat competition. Neazle has been under attack because he posted strong negative views on Genshin Impact two years ago, along with some offensive memes.

A comment saying the “the Army of Adeptus” is “sending a thief to catch a thief” received 45 likes in a game community.

Others think “the Army of Adeptus” simply use Genshin Impact to justify their immature and irresponsible actions and that actions like harassing other people online or doxxing cannot be justified by any means. They believe those actions cannot defend the game community but instead harms it.

Source: Bilibili

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