Comment by _fat_santa
4 years ago
As a non-player. I'm confused by how and why they are getting leaked? First the how.
Are players just stumbling on this stuff through internet sleuthing? I'm sure anyone with clearance to view said documents would not be leaking them on an Tank Game Forum.
Now as to the why. Barring some sort of intelligence/counterintelligence work (conspiracy theory territory but you never know), why would this stuff get leaked? I would assume it's players wanting a more accurate experience?
My theory is it's just hardcore players/mod makers that want to mimics every real life detail of the real tanks. The info being leaked has likely already been "leaked" but somewhere not as visible as the WarThunder forums, so we only hear about it when it pops up there.
> I'm sure anyone with clearance to view said documents would not be leaking them on an Tank Game Forum.
Out of everyone in the population, who do you think is most likely to be a hardcore player/mod maker for WarThunder? Is it:
(A) John Teenager, taking a gap year to play video games and scour double-digit pages on Bing for details on new tanks, stumbling across mailing lists and unsecured Slack channels from third-party suppliers
(B) James Bond, foreign counterintelligence operative who hacked into the DoD and forgot which specs were public and which ones he only knew from his hacking efforts
(C) GI Joe, tank maintenance tech, who just really likes tanks, so much so that he got a job working on them and plays video games that involve tanks in his spare time.
I'm a controls engineer and programmer, and yeah, some of my hobbies involve my experience; I'm pretty skilled with Arduinos, 3D printers, and Minecraft redstone. Is an Arduino sketch that drives a stepper using the same set of signals as a brand-new, NDAed, proprietary Fanuc servodrive a problem in the same way classified specs for a military tank a problem? Not really, anyone who knows about servos would build the same basic API but that's the order of encoder values, commanded positions, acceleration/velocity/travel limits, and home/limit switches etc. that I'm familiar with, so why not?
Don’t underestimate the butthurt of a nerd trying to win an online argument. I think for one of the challenger leaks the dude was trying to win a stupid forum argument
The Techspot article on this goes into a bit more detail on the other leaks (https://www.techspot.com/news/94803-gaijin-war-thunder-forum...) but generally yes, it's people with clearance who are players of the game and want to get something in game corrected to be more like reality.
> it's people with clearance who are players of the game and want to get something in game corrected to be more like reality.
While i get the good intentions here, this is shockingly short sighted for players (with classified access) to be doing this.
It's less "good intentions" and more butthurt that the tank that they work on isn't as powerful in the game as they think it should be.
Think of a sports fan complaining that their favorite player is rated too low by Madden or FIFA's video game representation of the stats. "Whaddya mean that Justin Herbert is only rated 91, he should be rated 97!" Except instead of pointing to some box scores on ProFootballReference to attack the naysayers, you leak classified intelligence.
They just want to know their OP tank is OP because of this secret
clearance is a prereq only. it doesnt give you the ability to freely browse. need to know is still 1 so its coming from specific people or other leaks
Milsim nerds can be incredibly particular and either end up having access to such documents through their work, or merely find and post documents they come across online. The struggle to win an online argument can result in a shocking amount of research fueled on nothing by pettiness and bitter nerd-rage tears.
Example about the availability of publicly available classified information: During the time when the Wikileaks stuff was first starting, Military personnel were instructed not to read articles or even headlines about Wikileaks, because they might contain classified information. Given that there would then be an issue with "need to know", reading the newspaper could inadvertently cause one to violate policy, and in turn require the violator to file a report on the matter. Rather than deal with however many reports, people were simply given a lawful order: Do not read any information pertaining to the subject.
Anyway, back to the point about nerds: If a guy is attempting to rotate the turret of a tank he spent 1.5 years grinding to get, and he knows that in real life his turret should rotate at a certain speed, but in game it actually takes longer to turn, and he dies as a result, the chance of him whining about it online is probable. Rinse and repeat this a few hundred times, and cost him potentially 10-20 million Silver Lions (free in-game currency) in repair costs, lost battles, etc. then you better believe he's going to get really salty about it. He's either going to say some things he shouldn't be saying (unlikely, but not impossible), or, he's going to find and link to documents that shouldn't be publicly available.
In turn, other nerds will notice this, report it due to the policies around classified information. Eventually it becomes a big to-do about something that was already accessible, but not necessarily well known.
AFAIK none of these leaks have come from those sorts of sources, they're from tank crewmen publishing classified docs for their own tanks
I wonder if DARPA et al will decide that the leaks are just the price they pay for having soldiers spend their free time fooling around in simulators with tanks they actually operate.
Fair point. I hadn't really investigated where the leaks had come from, was more just trying to give an example of how they could come about.
It’s funny to think that the purported justification for the order against reading Wikileaks news was actually believed by anyone who heard it.
“Don’t read this - it’s for your own good! Just reading it could cause you to have to report against yourself! No really!”
Total rubbish of course.
I was on a camp trip one time with a bunch of Spooks, and the mental gymnastics they went through to justify spying on regular people was nauseating. I can imagine the directive to avoid reading any news also gives you a one sided view about the subject.
As a Warthunder player myself, that is basically the reason. Most players like the game to be as realistic as possible, and some players really like a specific nation. When they see a vehicle under-performing, they try to dig up data and documents confirming so, which is then passed to the developers.
Problem is, for modern vehicles a lot of this info is classified, but some players seem to be persistent enough to get that info and try to use it.
There's a really great writeup of one incident on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/owtzl9/video_ga...