can you keep a secret Of course you can, you’re an adult. could you hold military secrets? If you’re threatened with jail (or worse) for revealing it, I bet you could. So why in gods name are people playing the tanks video game? WarThunder (of all things!) continue to divulge secret military documents?
To recap, it’s kind of that third I’ll write this story. The first was in July 2021:
The July case involved a player getting into a dispute on the game’s forums over the in-game depiction of the British Challenger 2 main battle tank. To settle the disagreements, they essentially published the tank’s manual, which was an enormously stupid thing to do – especially as it meant the British Ministry of Defense soon got involved.
Then, only three months later:
In this latest instance, a player gets caught up in a dispute on the game’s forums over the in-game depiction of the French Leclerc Main Battle Tank. To settle the disagreement, they released part of what was essentially the tank’s manual, leading forum moderators to wonder what the heck is up with these folks
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And today we are back. As first pointed out by @Osinttechnicalin a (n trying to get developers to change some in-game stats
The post in question has been removed War Thunders forums, but I’ve since seen the image reposted and then deleted on multiple occasions throughout the day on the same forums. It’s circulating everywhere now from Twitter to Reddit, to the extent that Chinese-speaking players have translated the round’s schematics and shared the data alongside the image. (THowever, most of the information should be considered was already known.)
Gaijin has since banned and narrated the user my box:
Our community managers immediately banned the user and deleted their post as the information about this particular shell is still classified in China. Posting classified information about vehicles of any nation on War Thunder forums is clearly forbidden and the game developers never use it in their work.
While we understand that our players want the most realistic gameplay possible, we kindly ask them not to do anything illegal or compromise their safety or the safety of our community team members. War Thunder developers do their best to research information about vehicles using legally available tools, and scandals like this are clearly not useful to our efforts.
The fact that a video game’s forums has become one of the greatest opsec dangers of the modern age, just because some guys want to argue about a tank’s stats, it is deep funny.
