The comments were also aware of this stuff, and noticed that there was apparently the same guy in the pcgamer thread that had multiple alts all cross-responding/defending each other and up-ranking each others posts.

I believe the comments that were suspicious of that as well, given all these people were making the exact same kinds of typos and poor grammar mistakes. And they were all from south america somewhere where apparently there are "rent-a-trolls" to coin a term. Basically people that get paid to do shit like this.

Even if he wasn't being paid to try to defend Elite, it was basically the same guy. ie: far fewer real people actually think what Elite did was proper.