Why do War Thunder players leak classified information? [video]
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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.
(Remember too that having a clearance and having access are different things. Only a rare few have unfettered access to download/print/email to/from classified systems. Lots of gamers work at/for the NSA. That doesnt mean they can all browse the f35 flight manual over lunch.)
if you link to the image directly, then you'll never learn the numbers. 356 is nerd sniping, 927 is standards, lucky 10,000 is 1053, load bearing is 2347, bobby tables is 327, research team is 1425...
not with that attitude! 927 comes up often enough, and it's memorable because 3^2*100 + 3^3 , or Yoda's age - 900 + the 27 club of musicians who killed themselves so start there...
992
He thought that was pretty odd, then he heard someone else yell out, "72!" Followed by even more laughter.
"What's going on?" he asked his cellmate.
"Well, we've all heard every joke so many times, we've given them each a number to make it easier."
"Oh," he says, "can I try?"
"Sure, go ahead."
So, he yells out "102!" and the place is dead quiet save for a few groans. Confused, he looks at his cellmate who is just shaking his head.
"Hey, what happened?"
"Well, some people can tell a joke, some people can't."
He asks "which one did I tell?"
His cellmate wipes a tear from his eye and says "none of us have heard that one before!"
> Get online and write something along the lines of, “hey guys, I just had the absolute best chicken rice at [restaurant x] in Singapore, no questions asked, hands down, everything else pales in comparison,” then sit back and enjoy the show as the internet foodie elite each jump into the fray to defend their own picks to the death. You’ll get a much bigger response, more passionate praise, and it’ll probably end up being a little fun to boot.
https://au.lifehacker.com/news/58784/find-the-best-food-in-a...
That's incredible!
Never heard this and Google is just giving me a bunch of law firms.
That’s called Cunningham’s law. The joke (which is actually quite funny) is that GP gave the wrong name for it and proved it.
It wasn’t clear and I understand the confusion but welcome into the joke, my friend. :)
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
---
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.
They take wildly inaccurate propaganda numbers and implement them, but nerf the numbers on US vehicles where they exist plenty of actual data from the manufacturer itself in many cases.
See for example 2S38 vs HSTVL & RDF/LT
edit: also, the point of a game is to be fun not to accurately characterize the real world (i.e. how many games have you played where you have to urinate or poop for the character?)
Problem is, nerfed vehicles like the HSTV-L have a higher rating than OP stuff like the 2S38, even though the HSTV-L is worse than it actually should be IRL.
The higher BR a vehicle has the more capable vehicles it has to fight.
Yet the gameplay is very arcadey and not very realistic.
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
Fortunately people still make short videos, like this (relevant) one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0WWbpBxLCI
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.
I recently described a manual workflow that includes extracting comments and combining them with the transcript using a system prompt.
I’m curious how others are approaching this.
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.
YouTube used to not let you go over 10 minutes at all, but that's a very long time ago now. You'd get guides split up into "... Part 3 of 7"
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.
Some things just aren’t worth talking about for that long.
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.
I have a bit of a background in print journalism so telling stories that convey information isn’t new to me. By the end, I was pretty good at conveying enough information in a limited number of inches.
Video is a totally different beast and short videos are very hard. I have a couple of 10 minute videos that may as well be presented in a foreign language that I don’t speak…and I made them.
Reading this, I think I’m just going to quit. It’s really not worth the time investment.
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.
Inb4 "They shouldn't want to make money and just publish their articles for free"
Inb4 "People should only be creative online as a side hobby when they are comfortably employed"
Which is easier of these choices:
Talking or writing?
Uploading to YouTube or publishing to a blog?
Building an audience of millions or already having them on the platform?
Considering that online creativity should be for everybody and not just hacker and academic types.
> The platforms are just middlemen rent seekers profitting on mindless zombies who are cunsuming content and just watch the next video in the recommendation flow.
Oh never mind, you are stuck in illusions. YouTube as of 2025 has the highest quality and biggest quantity visual media library in history. If you actually press the like and subscribe button on good videos a bunch of times, YouTube will start recommending videos of the highest quality possible. Going in-depth into any subject imaginable. Made by some of the world's most professional film crews. You're really missing out if you're deciding to be an angry hacker about this.
> but one problem is people now a day don't actually search for content, we are mindless zombies fed by algoritms
People choose to be like that. Think of it like a supermarket: Up in front is the worst kind of garbage "food", literal sewage that will destroy your health while living and kill you prematurely. In the back you have the highest quality produce and ingredients in abundance. You can go to the back of the supermarket and enjoy the benefits of having this broad access. Or do like most people and go to the front shelves and fill up your cart with poison. It's a choice.
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.)
The claim that most videos nowadays are hitting the one hour mark is trivially false.
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..."
Many people leave YouTube on in the background, but it doesn’t make sense to do that with TikTok style clips
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.
I’m sure YouTube’s algorithm is good at detecting which videos perform well even when you’re only listening to it.
Personally I find it annoying to watch 15 minute videos on the tv since you’re always having to go back to the remote and find something new.
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
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.
It's not OP! Here are secret docs to prove it!