'War Thunder' Forums Leak Classified Military Documents For The Third (!) Time

Is there a version of Dr. Doofenshmirtz's 'If I Had A Nickel…' meme for something happening three times?

Another player of the MMO military combat vehicle game War Thunder has leaked classified military documents in order to win their internet argument with mods, making this the third time this has happened in a year.

Since the post containing the leak has been taken down, only discussions elsewhere online can explain what exactly happened. According to a ResetEra user, War Thunder has an open development server in order to preview upcoming new content. Developers acknowledge that some of the values dictating how the new content posted in the server operates, such as armor, flight patterns and penetration skills, are placeholders and subject to change upon the final release.

Evidently, a Chinese player saw the placeholder values on a Chinese tank's armament shell and was so incensed he posted the actual, classified document containing the armament shell's real-world schematics, inadvertently committing some light treason in the process.

That document is now circulating on social media and has been translated by Chinese social media users, though Kotaku noted most of the information was known already.

A Chinese MBT crew member may have just leaked (a lot of) classified shell information on the Warthunder forum. Article soon.

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) June 1, 2022

War Thunder developers Gajin banned the user and told Kotaku:

Our community managers immediately banned the user and deleted his post, as the information on this particular shell is still classified in China. 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.

As mentioned earlier, this is, incredibly, the third time this exact problem has occurred in the past year. In October 2021, a player claiming to be a member of France's Leclerc Serie 2 tank crew took issue with the way the tank was presented in the game and posted the classified specs of the tank in order to win an argument in the game's forums. In July that year, essentially the same situation played out with a user taking issue with the game's portrayal of Britain’s Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank.

In this instance, as with the previous two, the War Thunder developers will purportedly ignore the information on the leaked documents, as Gajin is insistent it models its combat vehicles and weaponry through research of legally available information.