Fair Play: January 2024 and CAPTCHA

Official News, Development Blogs and Updates
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We’ve been fighting accounts that use bots for a long time, and we’re sure that active players have noticed the result as we’ve managed to significantly reduce the number of bots in all modes. We also continue to identify violators who use prohibited modifications, and today the number of blocked accounts is impressive.

Banned accounts

Over the last month, we’ve blocked 9,569 accounts that were found to be in violation of the rules. Specifically 3.2.3 of the EULA namely in the automation of gameplay (using bots) and cheat software.


For full transparency, we’re publishing the full list of these blocked players. This list will be available for two weeks after the publication of this article.

Player behavior analysis system and CAPTCHA for suspicious players

Over the past few months, we’ve been particularly focused on combating accounts that use automated gameplay, or bots as they’re normally called. Improved analysis methods that learn from player behavior allow us to effectively identify any offenders. Your complaints also play a key role in this process, as they help us quickly respond to new bot practices and provide a fair gaming experience for everyone.

We strive to ensure that every decision we make is fair and reasonable. Understanding that there are accounts that may seem suspicious, we’ve introduced a new CAPTCHA functionality. Accounts that the system suspects of using bots will be periodically subject to automatic verification using CAPTCHA, and if your account is under suspicion don’t worry — just complete the CAPTCHA to continue playing. The CAPTCHA will be displayed to suspected players before the battle, which in turn will help further reduce the number of bots in the game.

In obvious cases by analyzing a player’s behavior when completing the CAPTCHA, the system will be able to automatically block a violator’s account. At the same time, we’re making every effort to avoid false positives in the system. This is an additional step in ensuring the integrity of all War Thunder battles.

What we recommend

We recommend that you set a strong password for your account and enable two-step authentication in your profile. This will protect your account from fraudsters. And remember, don’t use forbidden client modifications and never share your account information with anyone!

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Impressive. Still ,we need to work harder against cheaters.

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Nice!

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Nice!

And a little suggestion,publish which squadron these players belongs to.

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Thats a lot of accounts. Are you blocking IP address’s as well or just accounts?

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That wouldn’t be useful, because most IP of residential connections are dynamic.

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A year ago this figure was 100 a month, now it’s approaching 10,000 a month.

Just wanted to say… this is great work. It’s hard to gainsay anyone when they manage to scale up their processes a hundred fold in under a year.

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How is gres, the first one on the page with a five-digit PID, level 100 with 25 battles? I’m so confused.

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I think it is outstanding that the bots are being addressed, I might try naval more because of fewer bot accounts. But PLEASE do something about cheating. I am really reluctant to encourage others to join. There have been some great changes with the economy and some good premiums, but the cheaters are discouraging. There seem to be noticeable times when cheaters play. Last night every match had at least two. In my last match before I quit some dude just sat behind a building staring at targets, popping out to shoot them or sitting at a corner knowing a player was going to come around. I honestly was considering purchasing a couple of US premiums and inviting others to play. I am waiting for more to be done about cheating. This is loosing you money.

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What is the value in that?

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Pasta1019 banned lool, called this guy out for cheating about 2 weeks ago… magically he managed to come find me twice in his su25… And died twice to my gepard, no radar up and behind buildings in sun city… Yet knew exactly where i was… Stopped him getting a nuke because he was fixated on trying to kill me for calling out his bs… Now he’s banned lmafo

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Good progress.

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Assault modes, single-player battles, newbie zone battles at times… over the last 11 years since that player joined there’s been lots of ways to accumulate player level without running up your battle count.

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There are squadrons in this game using hack software in an organized way. If Gaijin publish the names of squadrons,regular players would more likely to watch the replay and report suspicious action when they are killed by members of certain squadron,instead of threat it like another “coincidence”

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I assume most of these people aren’t organized in a squadron, it has no real value unless they’re participating in events and such.
So I think you’d mostly just cause squadrons to get a bad name because they had a cheater in it or something.

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It would make it easier for squadron leaderships who have strong policies on these things to remove people from large Discords and the like if they’ve already been banned in game.

And it would help shame those squadrons that don’t have similar in-house policies into doing so. I think it would be a great idea. Squadrons that allow a member who cheats and profit from the squadron research that player earned for cheating SHOULD get a bad name.

Lots of players on this ban list and the previous one are/were in squadrons, your assumption is kinda wrong, as well.

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It’s a good start. Can I suggest also challenging with captchas mid SB match as well. With active monitoring of things like repeated deaths into an AF or crashes.

Captchas only work if there is no player in the loop

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Squadrons have absolutely zero moderation tools, the few features that they do have do not even work properly.
How do you expect a squadron to detect cheaters if Gaijin can’t even figure it out?

And I’m not saying they’re not in squadrons, I’m saying they’re not organized in squadrons.

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Squadron leaders get complaints from other players about their players all the time. The squadron leaders whose members are featured every week on WTCS have the proof right in front of them. Not acting in those situations is a choice they are making.

In Class Act when we kick a player for in-game offenses based on player reports we receive, we do our own review, tell everyone who it was if the violation is clear and offer links to their replays. It’s just basic due diligence. They can keep playing til Gaijin catches them… just not with us.