War Thunder Forums Have, For the Third Time, Been Used to Leak Classified Military Intel
For the third time, a War Thunder player has leaked classified military intel on the game’s forums in response to, in this case, ammo for Chinese tanks not being accurate enough.
As reported by UK Defense Journal (via PC Gamer), a user uploaded an image of the DTC10-125 tungsten penetrator and a technical doc containing its specifications because they were angry about some small inaccuracies.
The part in question is a “high-velocity, non-explosive 125mm sabot round fired by the Chinese Type 96 and Type 99 MBTs” and is considered “one of the [People’s Liberation Army’s] main tank killing rounds.”
This leak, which very well could be considered treason, follows similar leaks on War Thunder’s forums that revealed classified information on the British Challenger 2 and French Leclerc main battle tanks. What sets this apart, however, is that it appears to have been entirely unnecessary.
Nobleman Swerve on ResetERA said this crime was for naught as the assets used in-game of the round in question are not representative of the final product.
“The game recently closed a publicly accessible development server that previewed the upcoming content drop,” they wrote. “The thing about these dev servers is that the values for things such as armor, penetration, or flight models are usually placeholders subject to change on final release.
“So what happens was the developer added this shell to the server, but copy/pasted the values of the previous version as a placeholder. This poster saw this, flipped out, and went ahead and posted treason to correct what are publicly communicated as placeholder values.”
Either way, the post has been removed by War Thunder developer Gaijin Entertainment, and the team has once again pleaded to its community to not commit criminal acts on its forums.
“Our community managers immediately banned the user and deleted his post, as the information on this particular shell is still classified in China,” the studio said in an email to PC Gamer. “Publishing classified information on any vehicle of any nation at War Thunder forums is clearly prohibited, and the game developers never use it in their work.
“While we understand that our players want the game to be as realistic as possible, we’re kindly asking them not to do anything illegal and jeopardize their safety, as well as safety of our community team members. The developers of War Thunder do their best to research information on vehicles using legally available tools, and scandals like this are clearly not useful for our efforts.”
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
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