Welp, reading through Reddit, it seems that this dude was kicked out of Statshark and Statshark will lose the live game viewer and history viewer functions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Warthunder/comments/1o13o3n/comment/nie7noe/
Nevertheless, Gaijin should investigate this, because by the looks of it, this looks like a heavy security breach.
With exception of live game viewer, statshark does not display any info that isnt publicly aviable through viewing your profile ingame and through official replay site.
Doesn’t mean they don’t have access to that data.
Unless the process with which statshark gains its data is made public, all we have are speculations.
Before someone accuses me of defending that one peculiar statshark team member, let me put the disclaimer - Im not defending his actions.
With that out of the way
Sure, they could have access to that data. Especially if you logged into the statshark website, which lol.
But, if you never logged into their website - which seems the case with Ripbozo - then all the data they likely can have are those publicy aviable through either viewing his ingame profile or looking up his name in replays.
So I suppose that’s the end of that. Sorta called it in the OP?
For those not following Statshark owner “Hadi” has confirmed that the access the live viewer needed as well as the global stats this OP was based on were provided by Statshark dev team member “Pluspy” and have now been shut down because Pluspy has left StatShark over allegations they chat-hacked another player. So September is the last month of these stats the community is going to get.
It’s a shame: for seven months players had their first real insight into the relative popularity of modes and BRs. While it seems that data they purloined here might stay up (I hope so) from now on it will only grow progressively more stale.
It is entirely reasonable to believe, now that we know more about Pluspy’s background and some of the stuff they’ve done using apparent admin-level privileges or backdoor access in the past and since, that this data was being accessed and pulled by Pluspy, starting in February, 2025, without Gaijin’s consent, and was never intended to be shared with players, making it a de facto ToS violation on their part.
There’s a lot of Discord screenshots going around of previous things Pluspy and Hadi have both said and done over the years. I have no comment other than to say it’s worth checking the dates on those, and remembering that Statshark Discord and website were only created in August, 2024, so before that they’re obviously from other sites. Equally obviously I think chat-hacking another player using illicitly obtained access, the one provable accusation here since Hadi started Statshark and which he says Pluspy has now left the site over, is both reprehensible and inexcusable behavior by anybody.
I don’t personally regret anything I did here in helping bring the existence of these stats or Statshark to other players’ attention, but if Gaijin takes action against those people involved in Statshark for breaking ToS, I won’t be one defending them. Hadi is trying to keep the other parts of the Statshark site up that did not involve Pluspy’s likely improper access to Gaijin data, and I do think some of those other parts of the site are useful to players and worth sustaining if he and his team can move on from this. In the past I have also said if you support Statshark you should consider giving them something on Patreon. I would totally understand now if anyone, based on these events coming to light yesterday, disagreed with that previous recommendation. I think you would be justified in believing Statshark needs to earn back players trust after tolerating what they tolerated here. I don’t believe anyone visiting their website or Discord to use the services that were available at the time or now has done any damage to themselves or their account security by doing so, but all players are at risk the longer Gaijin lets a rogue person with admin/dev level access and no obligation to use it responsibly continue to have that access.
Lol why? They still parse data, still publish it further.
They gather it from replays, seems nobody gonna remove the replays from the player access. You kind of dramatizing here.
Downplaying the signifigance of this is just begging to have your data leaked and account hacked, but who am I to tell you that’s a bad thing
Hadi has said that the individual vehicle stats, which is gathered from individual player records, not replays, will continue. The coloured tables at the top of each monthly page, broken down by mode, country and BR, came from Pluspy and will stop after the one that was just published (September). The aggregated data in those tables came from Pluspy’s backdoor or admin level access.
Could you show that exactly message?
Statshark global vehicle-by-vehicle stats are aggregated from the service records of all active players on Gaijin leaderboards, which are scraped. Not replays. So those will continue.
However, the monthly stats that this OP relied upon in the table at the top of each global statistics mode page, by country and BR, were always derived completely independently from the vehicle stats. They were provided starting in February by Pluspy using his enhanced access to the administrative functions of War Thunder. As Hadi put it in the same post, "About six months ago, he approached us with an offer to help us get some of the more complicated data. We did reach an agreement, and he gave us an outlet to get certain data, mainly related to player statistics. He never contributed to our codebase directly. The extra data and his ways of getting them were hosted on an external server owned just by him.
“After the video, he left on his own terms, and his outlet for giving us the relevant data has been shut down.”
Damn shame.
Agreed … so as I understand the guy’s contribution to the Statshark project, he was filching the company’s proprietal data on monthly win rates by BR and country and the like and explaining to Hadi how to interpret and present it (the web presentation coding was all Hadi’s).
For the live viewer XVM clone he was pulling a live list of millions of player IDs and player names and hosting it somewhere where the Statshark web code could ping it hard without imposing lookup demands on the company’s own copy of the data.
That’s all he was really doing for his old friend who was now running Statshark. It was basically corporate intelligence work, theft really, just ostensibly for the customers. People can still go to jail for that in some parts of the world.
That means the XVM clone thing some people hated and were worried about was likely never going to survive long, as it depended on his continuous unauthorized access to a company system that Gaijin could turn off at any time. The chat hacking he apparently committed and that got him caught probably wasn’t any fancy code mojo either, he just had/has unauthorized admin rights.
Theft of data and access is still theft. To some degree you could say Statshark was white-knighting here by hosting stolen company data to share it publicly and directly with players, but they both knew the origins of their data (data that helped them to basically drive their own competitor Thunderskill out) and were taking donations to keep it up, and it ultimately made them vulnerable by association to the other unreliable and not-player-friendly actions of the thief.
What Statshark ISN’T to blame for is any of the thief’s own actions against other players before February using that advantaged access, or the recent chat hacking. That’s squarely on Gaijin, it now seems clear, as a pure ongoing corporate security lapse. For all we know this guy is just a friend (or a child) of a network admin, or maybe one of their investors, who lifted their password and had the skills to use it, and they so far have been either unwilling or unable to revoke that person’s elevated access. It seems implausible they don’t know who it is at this stage. That’s a little concerning.
From my point of view, this whole situation regarding more detailed player data is much more complicated.
What we have is probably an interface that allows people to access certain information. We don’t know for sure if it’s the same interface used by user profiles or something completely different. It’s quite obvious that Gaijin collects a lot of different types of data. Saying that accessing one kind of data is fine while accessing another is basically data stealing seems like an oversimplification. We don’t know how it works, and we don’t know why Gaijin allowed access to this information in the first place.
A perfect example of this is the localhost server that the game creates when you run it. As far as I know, there is no official documentation for this feature - everything we know about this server comes from user research. I’ve never seen the actual developers officially talk about this server anywhere. It’s even funnier because our Community Managers aren’t really sure what’s allowed and what’s not when using this data. There’s no official announcement about it, only personal interpretations from some staff members. But this is only their personal opinion. They can’t guarantee that you won’t get banned for creating a tool that uses this data.
That’s the whole problem with undocumented data. It’s possible that the game’s server allows access to global data by design, but that access just isn’t documented anywhere. So if you know how to use it, you can. Assuming it’s illegal to access this data raises questions about why this interface exists in the first place. Gaijin could block it at any time - especially after noticing a large number of new requests from unknown sources trying to gather all this data. It’s really hard to believe they’ve never heard of StatShark or noticed what they were doing. If it was truly a big issue for Gaijin, I’m sure that interface would have been shut down back in March 2025.
The truth is, we just don’t know how any of this really works. Maybe it’s much simpler than we think. Just like how people can extract a lot of very detailed data from the localhost server - even data that regular players don’t have access to through the in-game UI. Having more data than regular players who don’t use their localhost server already gives an advantage to those who do. That’s why people use this data - because it gives them something extra. You can even set sound alerts for specific triggers, while regular players have to rely solely on their eyes. If this additional data were completely useless, no one would bother with it.
From this perspective, accessing localhost server data is much more questionable than accessing advanced player stats. Only Gaijin can say what is legal and what is illegal here, but for whatever reason they decide to stay silent.
Ok, final thoughts on our last month of aggregate data before Statshark stops publishing it.
A caveat: something I’ve known for a while now is that Statshark was adjusting the values of some of this global user data to protect the source (I suspect that was limited to the stolen data, not anything else about the site, which the owners could and still can get legitimately for now, such as the individual vehicle data, I don’t believe any of that is being altered). Since we now all know the source was Pluspy, I’m less inclined to keep that confidence. I don’t know what factor he applied to the data to mask it or how to reverse engineer it either, so we have what we have. This is, of course, the problem with all stolen data: you can’t really compare with the original. But to the degree I (and you) are still inclined to trust any of it, here’s what September (and the eight months we could see inside actual proprietal data about War Thunder) tells us.
1. Steam data was a pretty good predictor
Steam users are only a portion of the player base, and people often say you shouldn’t use them to discuss how War Thunder is doing. This is true, but the decline in player sessions in Statshark over the last half-year and the decline in Steam numbers actually pretty closely tracked the whole time (I’m using steamcharts.com for this, other third-party Steam trackers have slightly different values).
The exception there was February, Statshark’s first attempt, which is an outlier, can’t explain that one. But the rest is so close it’s fair to say Steam data has some use (and given that’s all we’ll have again after this month, it’s interesting for these last 7-8 months it has tracked the all-player patterns very well).
2. Vehicle events don’t change play patterns much
After eight months, it’s safe to say that the single vehicle events do not change relative play patterns very much, with a couple exceptions. If we look at the months with more than 7 days of a single-vehicle event, like the F-106 event, we could expect that players would play more of that event mode and less of the other modes. What we see is a swing of about 4% of ground mode sessions or 8% of air mode sessions back and forth, or about 4 million user sessions per month total (out of 220 million+ in a month), as the “swing vote.” This is not a huge effect, and suggests most people kept playing the mode they like regardless of the single-vehicle events this year. Also notable is the gains are almost all on the realistic side (ignoring SB here because those “user sessions” are not really comparable), over arcade. If anything, arcade play in ground and air goes down during vehicle events (probably because of players chasing multipliers).
The exception is naval… which a naval event will lead to a significant swing to that mode (about 30% more player sessions in both AB and RB this year), that’s maybe 1.5 million user sessions attracted away from the other modes, or about a third of the swing between the other two modes. While it’s still a big deal for naval popularity when a vehicle event happens, basically even most of the people who like these vehicle events don’t change their play for the naval ones.
3. Air modes have been declining in popularity relative to ground this year
In a time when the whole pie was shrinking (mid-2025 was the worst mid-year in terms of player loss proportionately in War Thunder’s history, both Steam and Statshark agree, with a 20% player loss March-Sept compared with 10% in 2023, their previous worst year), air mode user sessions shrunk significantly faster than ground modes.
Between March and September, ground modes (AB/RB) fell about 15%. But the air modes combined fell over 30%, with ARB falling faster than AAB. Ground, and specifically ground RB, with over 50% of all AB/RB user sessions, is the majority mode now. This is what makes it so baffling to me that there have been no ground events at all since June. Maybe Gaijin thought it was healthy enough and wanted to use this midyear to prop up the other modes more, with two naval events either side of the F-106 event?
4. Naval changes made no major difference to player patterns
A series of naval changes this year, and a major update focussed on naval, succeeded in raising the player base of naval somewhat (from about 1.4% of player sessions in Feb/Mar to about 2.3% in September… but the 30% boost mentioned above from the Mackesen event running would have provided a lot of that in September too, though so any overall gain independent of events could have been quite small; but at least with the Statshark sessional stats stopping this month naval fans are going out on a high note, scraping in above 2% of sessions like that, though), but the overall proportion between NAB and NRB player sessions ended up in September (67.8% AB) almost exactly where it was in February (67.6% AB).
Basically both sides of the ongoing debate in this forum appear to have been wrong. The naval changes to (and to AB in particular) did not bring a whole lot of new players to naval overall, as many as hoped (although they did bring some). But people who said the naval AB changes would drive people from that mode also haven’t seen their predictions bear out. At the time I said the NAB changes weren’t drastic ENOUGH and that the two modes needed to be much more strongly differentiated for them to stay independently healthy, even if it meant I likely wouldn’t play one of them anymore: I’m still comfortable with that assessment.
The real problem with naval has persisted past decompression, that unlike the other modes with different AB/RB BR patterns that give both submodes a distinct role, NRB and NAB are still both played basically in the same proportion at all BRs, essentially in direct competition with each other:
The exception there may be NRB at 3.0 and below, which has declined to almost nothing now. Seeing a lot of people reporting 1v1 and even 1v0 coastal games now (seen a couple myself). There the remaining players who don’t want to just fight bots have picked a mode, for better or for worse. These things have a “rolling downhill” effect, as people abandon the 6 minute queue times and increasing bottedness of it all, so at 3.0 and below it’s safe to say NRB is a dead mode. NRB remains healthy at all the bluewater BRs though, at least for now.
5. The US is still a top 3 nation only because of the air modes
Players by country haven’t changed much over six months, China continues to develop slowly into the #4, firmly passing UK and Japan this year, Italy and Israel continue to need the most love. And the US ground game continues to be where it’s weakest in terms of player base, whereas in the air modes it continues to be the dominant nation by a significant margin. (This should be concerning for US mains, though, if air continues to decline as a mode relative to ground.) One can’t really help but attribute this to high-tier/end-game problems in ground RB, given that it’s the majority mode, which really seem to have broken US viability recently relative to Germany or USSR.
Naval is not hugely relevant for any nation, although the strongest there is probably Japan, with 6% of its AB/RB user sessions being in naval games. Also notable here are the relative success within their modes of French air and Italian ground overall, compared to the other minor nations (one has to wonder if the recent addition of subtrees (which have mostly been on the air side of France so far) could have had something to do with that. Some good news there for Italian ground mains anyway.
This one is probably the most interesting thing to see, but I wonder if this could be atributed to the vehicle selection we got with the events during the time Statshark was active, ie. if the swing would be larger with more “interesting” vehicles.
This cause they take a month break from events in June - July as they did year before. Missing one naval event after t34-85 and then bringing two of them, naval still got less events in the year than tanks and planes, which is not helping to promote naval modes. So there will be no more naval events till new year holidays, what will lead to another playerdrop in naval modes for 3 month in a row, if nothing significant will be added in next two major patches, and looks like it will not be anything, except one ambiguous damage control thing(which could lead to even more player disappointment in mode, due to decreased TTK).
sad to see how little Air matters now.
There were no claims that aiming changes will bring a lot of players(hopes probably, not assurance), there were claims that the they will not drive them out, in oppose to some boatlovers insists. “Leviathans” defiantly attracted big chunk of of some old and some new players, NRB is doubled in numbers and NAB was close to doubling. NAB showed longer retention of the players after that update, when NRB lost big chunk of it playerbase just month after and even more next month.
For sure events is what attract people to naval modes(But i could say that not only events themselves, but absents of events for other type of vehicle, so players could choose what they want to play and relax a bit, trying something new, i stay with my opinion, that old events system was better and new one is what caused part of stagnation in playerbase growth and brings those swing disproportions in the different modes, as i myself is tired out of those constant events, which never almost happened with old system).
I think this is possible, though personally I hated the old event system. “Event Thunder” basically became a different game experience altogether. Now completing ground events for example is much more relaxed, especially if you play between say 6.7 and 7.7, since I feel like a lot of people doing the event tend to focus below or above that range.
Now playing events is almost indistinguishable from playing the game regularly. I like that, but it may also be why it’s not the magnet for returning players that it was before. Not sure.
I will say that another factor may be the constant watering down of the battle pass. I feel much less incentive than I used to to complete the challenges, dailies, and specials.
Don’t forget that acquiring the coupons for sale, now twice and sometimes trice harder than with previous system in terms of time invested, if you not using optimal OP setups or vehicles.
