Why do War Thunder players leak classified information? [video]
49 comments
·January 31, 2025brenainn
raziel2701
Wow so this is the "if you want a good answer from the internet post a wrong answer first" but escalated by a ton!!
That's incredible!
wnevets
> The game aims for realistic vehicle specifications, like armour thickness, penetration values etc.
Yet the gameplay is very arcadey and not very realistic.
itronitron
Sounds like this could inspire a simple test as to whether someone should have access to classified information, which would also positively indicate their more mature than a twelve year old.
rincebrain
At least once, someone has reported online that they were asked if their friend played War Thunder when they were doing an interview to explore their friend's getting a clearance, so...
CamperBob2
Maybe such a test could be administered before turning the keys to the Treasury Department over to a guy who cheats at WoW...
Edit: Correction, Path of Exile 2
Ygg2
Who? Elon cheats at Path of Exile 2.
schainks
Wow what a honeypot. Bet every government military loves this game to reverse engineer equipment.
robotnikman
Going to hijack the top comment to provide my own observations as a player
As a War Thunder player myself, here is some insights off the top of my head I can provide from the player base point of view, and as someone who has also submitted documentation to the devs to fix historical inaccuracies of some vehicles in the game...
-Players can submit bug reports for vehicles, reporting incorrect characteristics, missing features etc.
-In order to do so, players must research and compile documentation supporting their cases, from at least 2 primary sources. This means those devoted to such a report can spend hours or even days gathering material for their sources, sometimes going as far as digging through the historical archives of companies or countries for information
---
Here's where problems start to arise:
-The bug reports are overseen by a few volunteers who review the bug reports and decide what gets sent to the developers and what does not, who have a track record of arbitrarily choosing what gets passed to the developers for fixing, and what does not. So even a well made bug report with more than enough documents and source materials can be denied, and all the efforts of the reporter are in vain.
-Even if a bug report gets passed to the developers, there is no timeline on when the missing features or inaccuracies of a vehicle will be fixed, and no communication from the developers whatsoever. It may be one month until its fixed, it may be 5 years, it may be never.
-The most heated discussion and reports revolve around modern day vehicles, where source materials may still be classified, or is available but marked as export restricted. The developers are very inconsistent when it comes to which bug fixes the accept or refuse when it comes to modern vehicles. For example, there were multiple reports of the Abrams and Challenger tanks armor being weaker in game than they should be, these reports were declined by the developers despite the multitude of sources. And yet on another occasion, a player submitted a report on the T-90 missing it's spall liners, and they were added by developers with the only source provided being a youtube video.
-The developers recently changed the bug reporting system so that once a bug report is submitted, only the bug report reviewers and the author of the bug report can see the documentation submitted; the lack of transparency leads to lack of trust, some believing some reports which get submitted may be approved and implemented based the personal biases and views of the developers or bug report reviewers
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So basically you have a playerbase of passionate players who like history and military vehicles, who go out of their way to perform the jobs of a historian to provide the correct information to the developers to correct historical inaccuracies in a game, only for their efforts to be disregarded due to arbitrary decision making of the developers or bug report reviewers, even if the compiled reports follow all guidelines.
praptak
"Don't ask questions, post some blatantly wrong answers on the internet. You'll have angry PhDs running to explain how you are wrong!"
nomius10
I remember a time when crossing the 10 minute mark was really stretching it on YouTube. Nowadays most videos hit the 1 hour mark... I'm not sure if this is what the market demands, or this is just Google nudging creators in this direction.
Fortunately people still make short videos, like this (relevant) one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0WWbpBxLCI
csa
> Nowadays most videos hit the 1 hour mark... I'm not sure if this is what the market demands
For many genres, this is simply what pays the most for the creators.
Some people just flip on a video and let it play — maybe just in the background, maybe as they fall asleep. The ads that get played when they aren’t paying attention still generate revenue for the creator.
This is one reason why any working streamer should pretty much always have some sort of a long-form channel. It makes bank for relatively little additional effort.
bdndndndbve
Pretty sure the answer is ads. "Long-form" content has more opportunities to insert ads or sponsored content. There's not a lot of money to be made being quick and to the point.
People's viewing habits have also changed in response, rather than having the algorithm bounce them around they'd rather half-pay-attention to a 3 hour video. But I think the trend of ever-growing video lengths was spawned by a desire for more revenue.
AlotOfReading
The market bifurcated. Short form content became Snapchat and tiktoks and YouTube shorts. There were never any significant competitors to YouTube for long form content because of how expensive streaming it is, so all of that content remained on the one platform with an audience and decent payouts.
galangalalgol
I only go to youtube when I want to learn something that is hard to explain with pictures. Usually that is diy stuff for me, but I can see it being something like a dance move or a boss fight in a game, those things take longer than a minute to explain but never take more than 15 unless it is padded.
singron
Youtube used to add mid-roll ads to videos that were at least 10 minutes, so your video would basically make twice as much if you stretched it that long. I think the threshold is 8 minutes nowadays.
Short form is hard to monetize (if you are Google 8 years ago) since you need to split ad revenue and attribution among the several videos you watch between ads. This goes against a ton of prior trends in the ad industry where last touch attribution is still king and ad fraud is hard to combat. If course tiktok did it late with creator rewards.
jamesy0ung
I quite like to grab the transcript from youtube and ask chatgpt to give me the key points.
ashoeafoot
Also you can split out shorts.
mindcrime
Fortunately people still make short videos
Interesting. I don't see anything fortunate about that myself. I guess it's a "different strokes for different folks" thing. Personally, I rarely watch any video that's less than 20 minutes long. I think of short videos as being too small to contain enough useful info to be worth my time (although that's obviously not literally true for all short videos). And generally speaking, I prefer videos that are 30 minutes to an hour long, that really dive into the nitty gritty of some topic.
I don't know how representative of "the market" I am (probably not very) but I can at least attest that there are those of us out there with this particular preference.
LPisGood
The problem with everyone making long videos is that it leads to a situation where, intentional or not, it seems like everyone is trying to waste your time.
Some things just aren’t worth talking about for that long.
nomius10
Pretty much this. A short video is a fairly strong indication that the author did his work and respects your time, while a long one is a fair indication of the opposite. I've come to recognize some red flags in longer videos, such as including unnecessary bloopers, reading very slowly, reading long and frequent definitions, going on tangents, and generally not synthesizing the information enough such that all the bits presented tie into the main topic.
I would lie if I said that I don't consume long form documentaries on Youtube. I do and there are some channels that I deeply enjoy. But for a while, especially since they removed the dislike button, I've become wary of discovering new channels. It's often hit or miss, and the overall time investment doesn't look justifiable in retrospect. For this exact reason, I've removed all my subscriptions, and disabled all recommendations. I mostly poll for channels that I remember had good content that was meaningful to me.
bowsamic
In my experience long videos on YouTube are extremely inefficient at conveying information, often repeating themselves in order to pad out the length. This is even the case for the better creators
DaSHacka
I've noticed this too, it's becoming somewhat infamous that modern YouTube videos are all these 1+ hour long 'video essays' on topics which could easily be replaced with 2-3 page articles to be read in half the time.
While back in the day a long video essay was usually borne out of necessity and thus information-dense and high-quality—not unlike a documentary, actually—it feels like length itself is an objective for a lot of newer videos.
I suspect many subconsciously think "if my video is 2+ hours long, then clearly it's high-quality and well-researched", regardless of the actual density of information.
And don't even get me started on content creators that use AI-generated sludge because they don't have enough relevant visuals for the runtime of the video. Like dude, just make the video shorter.
lupusreal
A lot of long videos have very little informational content but they become long because their creator rambles, repeats himself, tells shitty repetitive jokes and wastes time with sarcasm and then clarifying those sarcastic remarks because otherwise some people won't get it, etc.
Drachinifel is a prime example of this. The channel "WWII US Bombers" is an example of the opposite, somebody creating information dense short videos because he has laser tight focus and no time for joking around. (Examples chosen for the conceptual proximity of their content, historic military ships and historic military aircraft.)
phreack
They used to pay by the view, now they pay by the minute. I think it's that simple.
RockRobotRock
People also use YouTube in different ways than they used to. Leaving it on in the background while they do something else.
I’m sure YouTube’s algorithm is good at detecting which videos perform well even when you’re only listening to it.
chowells
You should try watching the video instead of complaining about it's length. It turns out that it actually takes a bit of time to cover the history of Russia and Germany sufficiently well to explain the situation. Yes, those turn out to be relevant to answering the question.
vunderba
I'm guessing you're either missing or deliberately excluding the HUGE push by Youtube for "Youtube Shorts". Personally, I vastly prefer long (20+ minute) videos. However short videos are good for quick DIY / tutorials when I'm unable to find a written equivalent.
RockRobotRock
I don’t think the rise of shorts is mutually exclusive with longer videos being pushed on the platform, as well.
Many people leave YouTube on in the background, but it doesn’t make sense to do that with TikTok style clips
fsckboy
the huge push for youtube shorts is to compete with tiktok and instagram for that segment of the market. the longer form videos are a different segment of the market, they aren't entirely related
labster
I remember a time when YouTube was limited to 10 minute videos, and we watched Hollywood movies on there, 10 minutes per segment.
zoklet-enjoyer
That was back before Google purchased YouTube and they had their own video service called Google Video. Google Video was great because they didn't have that limit.
4ad
It's exactly backwards, YouTube favours short videos and frequent uploads. People doing long videos do it purely out of passion.
The claim that most videos nowadays are hitting the one hour mark is trivially false.
cgriswald
I simply can't believe there isn't some incentive for longer videos. It may be that YouTube only cares about total watch time and doesn't care if a creator pushes lots of short ones or a few long ones, as long as viewers keep viewing. I see so many videos like this:
Tie Shoes Like a Pro "If you're watching this video you probably want to know the secrets to good shoe tying. We'll show you how in this video. It's surprisingly easy, so don't go anywhere. But first, have you ever wondered why we tie our shoes? The first shoes weren't actually tied but were just soles that people nailed to their feet. <Cue hammer sound effect and scream> Haha, actually this didn't hurt at all because... <10 minutes pass> ...and then in 1890 Eritrea was founded, but you don't care about that! Haha! You're here to learn how to tie shoes! Don't worry, we'll get to that too! Anyway, also in 1890 all the leather factories in France burned down and so they couldn't spare leather for shoe buckles, so they began using bits of string..."
Tarq0n
Hey I just watched this! His channel has a great blend of history, politics and video games.
Personal favorites:
How economic and cultural conditions create friction between genders in South Korea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74
Why do you always kill gods in Japanese role playing games? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEUqLL8J4gI
asdf6969
Autism
refulgentis
Answer: they don't leak classified info, they leak restricted info that's effectively public domain.
Because both sound bad, there's benefits to all involved to do a little bait and switch there.
Notably, reputable publications don't play along.
This sounds disagreeable, but it's the boring truth. Some sourcing:
- "declassified information can still be considered “restricted,” and thus violates the game’s rules, [the game developer] said. In fact, the restricted manuals are available for purchase on legitimate websites."
[via Task and Purpose: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-military-sensitive-info-w...] [via Task and Purpose in another PR round: https://taskandpurpose.com/culture/war-thunder-challenger-2-...]
The UK Defence Journal is the worst offender, they're not reputable, but rather a bog-standard republisher that reliably finds a way to publish a headline on this every 6 months.
They cleverly don't assert anything themselves, but rather quote comments that are confused about classification. (i.e. compare to 2nd Task and Purpose link. same incident: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/classified-tank-specs-leaked...)
They've also started using AI to write it up for them.
c.f. comments on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490191, the latest round of virality
nutrientharvest
Very true. The most recent "leak" was of a document that is available on archive.org and has been for years[1]. But the bottoms of the pages have "NATO RESTRICTED" printed, so it was declined, and news sites once again exploded with "War Thunder player leaks secret military documents on forum!!"
cyberax
F-35 OP, pls nerf.
It's not OP! Here are secret docs to prove it!
jmyeet
It's this kind of leak that makes me 100% confident that there are no alien UFOs, there has been no alien contact, the US government wasn't behind the JFK assassination and so many other conspiracies. Why? Because people really can't keep secrets, particularly when they're not personally invested in them.
Pretty much all conspiracy theories boil down to a lack of understanding about whatever the theory concerns.
Some will object to that and point to examples like the United Fruit Company, various CIA-backed coups and so on but that's the point isn't it? Those things aren't secret.
kmeisthax
There's actually a mathematical model for this. See https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I'll provide some background for people that aren't familiar with the game. It's an online vehicular combat game where you pilot tanks, planes, helicopters and warships. The vehicles range from pre-WW2 to modern. The game aims for realistic vehicle specifications, like armour thickness, penetration values etc.
For older, actually real vehicles, that information is more easily available. For modern, classified vehicles, and vehicles that were never actually produced, they have to make reasonable assumptions. Sometimes players get upset about these assumptions and how they impact the game balance, and post classified design documents on the forums to argue their points.