The Christmas season is here, and War Thunder players found it apt to share sensitive military documents in online forums instead of, you know, actual gifts. This continues the long-running tradition among War Thunder enthusiasts inclined to win arguments against players or developers a bit too much.
War Thunder features all kinds of military vehicles in its roster, from tanks to aviation to naval weaponry—all of which have their real-life counterparts based on. Naturally, War Thunder players are fond of realism and accuracy, and the game does focus on that a lot, even though the gameplay is more similar to an arcade team-based shooter than a grounded mil-sim. Nevertheless, the accuracy of portrayal is crucial to the devs and players. Whenever something is amiss, players resort to leaking classified or sensitive military documentation to supply their arguments because this game is seemingly only played by top-level military intelligence. It’s happened many times before and twice in the past 10 days.
As reported by CyberDaily and Task&Purpose, the documents leaked weren’t labeled as classified but contained sensitive information on the Chinese and American VT-4 and M2A2 Bradley armored combat vehicles. The files appeared on Dec. 11 and 12, respectively. The former detailed the performance of the Chinese main battle tank and appears to have been a crew training manual released by the Royal Thai Army, CyberDaily reports. The M2A2 Bradley document was also a manual for the American infantry vehicle, which, according to Task&Purpose, contained “nuts-and-bolts level details.” Though neither of these documents is necessarily illegal and classified, War Thunder developer Gaijin Entertainment swiftly took them down to avoid any legal repercussions against the company.
The president of Gaijin Entertainment, Anton Yudintsev, spoke to Task&Purpose, saying the documents first appeared on Dec. 8 on other forums before finding their way to War Thunder. Yudintsev added that Gaijin has done all it could to prevent the documents from spreading, though what happens on its platforms is beyond its reach.
“While we did our part in helping to limit the leak spreading further by deleting that post, we can do nothing with what’s happening on other platforms,” Yudintsev said to Task&Purpose.
War Thunder players have become a meme in the gaming world for their inclination to cite classified or sensitive documents when discussing realism and accuracy. It’s happened nine times in 2023 alone. All this begs the question: why War Thunder? Why not World of Tanks? Or perhaps ARMA 3? Perhaps we’ll never know.
