Meta of honor
Tank game enthusiasts can’t stop leaking classified military data
For the third time in a year, a user has posted classified military data in an argument on the War Thunder forums.
Military secrets are supposed to stay, you know, secret. This fact has apparently eluded fans of the tank simulator War Thunder, as they keep posting real-life military schematics to the game's forums in order to win flame wars. And no, that's not an exaggeration.
As Kotaku reports, this most recent disagreement stems from a user lobbying the developers to change the stats of a Chinese tank shell. According to a ResetEra thread, when the user saw that the statistics of a certain shell were the same as a previous version of the game — when they were, in fact, placeholder values — they apparently leaked the real schematics of the shell in order to "correct" the developers.
Though War Thunder developer Gaijin banned the user and his post, the image of the schematics have been making the rounds online since the apparent leak. We won't post it here for obvious reasons, but let's just say you can find it with a quick Google search.
This is at least the third time that a user has posted classified military documents to the War Thunder forums in this manner. A clash got so heated in the last case that one user straight-up posted the manual for a French Leclerc tank, which probably went over very well with their superiors.
According to that thread, however, the funniest version of this phenomena involved the British Challenger 2 tank. That user also posted the manual for the tank, but that was after misrepresenting vital statistics of the machine (such as turret turn speed and machine gun length) in an apparent attempt to get it buffed.
Given that this user was presumably a real-life tank commander, this is the equivalent of Shinji breaking character to lobby Hideaki Anno to buff EVA-01. Or, if that reference doesn't make sense to you, this is like that time your weeb friend tried to convince your D&D DM that a katana does more damage than a greatsword. Steel sharpens steel, but it’s probably not worth going to Chinese military prison for the sake of the meta.
