History YMMV / WarThunder

** Classified document leaks [[labelnote:Explanation]]The game has become infamous, inside and outside its playerbase, for flamewars in the forums occasionally ending in someone trying to champion their tank or get another nerfed by resorting to real life specifications and documents... including actual military members resorting to ''classified documents'' on the vehicle's design in the heat of the moment. As of December 2023 it has been confirmed to have happened fourteen times, and more are suspected, leading to jokes about the game being a treasure trove for intelligence agents and a complete headache for defense ministries everywhere -- eventually reaching the point where Raytheon had to deny reports that their security clearance background checks [[https://www.reddit.com/r/Warthunder/comments/10j1hqr/congrats_guys_we_did_it/ ask friends and relatives of a potential hiree "does he play War Thunder"]]. Meanwhile, the game's Twitter account [[https://twitter.com/WarThunder/status/1615663032893317120 is "running out of jokes"]] for telling players to stop doing this.[[/labelnote]]

** The Pe-8 isn't really hated in air battles, where it's a mostly average to somewhat lackluster bomber that happens to have access to a bomb that is overkill for any situation. However, in ground and naval, it's despised. The Pe-8 can carry a giant ''5000 kg.'' bomb that's capable of wiping out entire formations of tanks and one-shotting cruisers on a near miss. Even friendly teammates hate the Pe-8 since its massive bomb resulted in team kills.

** "Attack the D point!"[[labelnote:Explanation]]A now-defunct radio callout for back when maps actually had four points of capture on Realistic and Arcade Modes. Constant radio callouts for assaulting/defending this non-existent point will usually devolve the chat into spamming random, disjointed responses such as "Leading for Landing!" or "Gramercy!". Mentioning War Thunder on any other subreddit thread will usually start a similar comment chain of random in-game radio callouts. It's also an AscendedMeme, considering the countdown and background screens of their livestreams has a marker for the D point. In addition, the Warfare 2077 gamemode of the 2021 AprilFoolsDay event had capturing the D, E, and F points as its objective. [[/labelnote]]

* CreatorProvincialism: This was thrown about for a time due to Gaijin Entertainment’s Russian origins. Several players charged that the Russian tree was overpowered, with most of their anger directed at the Yak-9T, at least in Arcade Battles. Its speed and maneuverability were nothing to write home about, but the armament and damage models generated a lot of heat. The machinegun is nothing special, but the Yak-9T is armed with a 37 millimeter cannon (the same caliber that the P-39 Aircobra is armed with). However, in earlier versions of the game, the cannon fired at a much, ''much'' faster rate than its American counterpart and did not overheat. This resulted in Yak-9Ts being able to spam huge, high-explosive rounds at a rate no other plane could match; if a Yak-9T landed a second or two of continuous fire, you could kiss your plane goodbye. The damage model was absurd as well, and was the largest complaint the fanbase had; the Yak-9T could take a ton of punishment before it went down, as demonstrated by [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ5dbWT4XUw “Lumberyak” video]], which showed the plane hitting each of its wings on ground obstacles multiple times at 100% throttle. Though both wings were reduced to “black” health after the first hit, neither were ever removed from the airframe (and the plane recovered ludicrously quickly for being so low to the ground and suffering such a large amount of damage). For comparison, the video also showed a Bf-109 attempting the same stunt; it couldn’t survive a single hit.

** Classified document leaks [[labelnote:Explanation]]The game has become infamous, inside and outside its playerbase, for flamewars in the forums occasionally ending in someone trying to champion their tank or get another nerfed by resorting to real life specifications and documents... including actual military members resorting to ''classified documents'' on the vehicle's design in the heat of the moment. As of September 2023 it has been confirmed to have happened thirteen times, and more are suspected, leading to jokes about the game being a treasure trove for intelligence agents and a complete headache for defense ministries everywhere -- eventually reaching the point where Raytheon had to deny reports that their security clearance background checks [[https://www.reddit.com/r/Warthunder/comments/10j1hqr/congrats_guys_we_did_it/ ask friends and relatives of a potential hiree "does he play War Thunder"]]. Meanwhile, the game's Twitter account [[https://twitter.com/WarThunder/status/1615663032893317120 is "running out of jokes"]] for telling players to stop doing this.[[/labelnote]]