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.
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.