It’s no surprise, players often fight online to prove themselves right. But sometimes it goes way too far like here.
How far are the players ready to prove themselves right? Or for the sake of realism? Much too far obviously since on a War Thunder Forum, fans leaked classified military documents on tanks. The documents in question relate to tanks of the French, British and Chinese armies. An entire program.
Secret documents to prove yourself right on War Thunder
For the record, War Thunder is a fairly popular MMO game with necessarily a forum where players meet to discuss… and debate! It was then that in 2021 a player published on the said game forum the manual for a British army tank, the Challenger 2. A tank that has been in service since 1998. The objective of the maneuver was to show the studio Gaijin Entertainment that the version of the game lacked realism. The document was partially obscured, and was marked UK RESTRICTED.
A few months later, another member of the forum, claiming to belong to an armored unit of the French army, directly shared the user manual of the Leclerc S2 tank. If the French army has confirmed nothing on the classified side of the documents, this is not the case with the British authorities who confirm the top secret side of the documents on the Challenger 2. Finally, a third user has published the manual of Chinese army tank, DTC10-125… All three posts have since been deleted by Gaijin Entertainment.
Risking everything for nothing
As The Washington Post reports, tank experts said the information in the documents was unlikely to be of much value to nations hostile to the respective three countries. But the disclosure of such documents can be punishable by law, especially if it is proven that the original purpose is to cause harm.
For his part, the founder of Gaijin Entertainment, Anton Yudintsev said:
We keep explaining to War Thunder users that it’s pointless to give us materials we can’t and don’t want to use, but there’s probably nothing more we can do to explain that.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to completely stop people from posting anything on the internet. We remove posts and permanently ban those who break the rules, so our users know they’re risking it all, basically for nothing.