No they’re just scraping service records, which are publicly available for all players via API as well as in game. They don’t leverage replays.
Because you can’t really hide your service record from other players, once they have your player ID, you’re in their system and being updated basically forever. The only way to avoid it would seem to be to uncheck the “leaderboards” option in game settings right when you create a new account. After a couple game sessions you’re on the leaderboards and that will no longer work though. But even then if someone knows your name and looks you up on their site (or you go to the site to check yourself if it’s working), the API call will also expose you and they’ll start tracking you anyway.
The exception is the live game viewer, where anonymizing yourself in settings should help hide your stats from other players using the viewer in the game you’re currently in (TBC).
They’re only making about $1k USD a month selling Gaijin’s own data to their Patreon subscribers via the live viewer. I’m sure that’s not Gaijin’s biggest problem at the moment.
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Service records from where? The only thing I’m able to find is community search but provides no details on game statistics in regards to vehicles or matches played with what vehicles.
I’ve only ever seen service records viewed from in game is there a way to see them outside? If so, can you provide a link to the api?
There are people who know if you look around for them. I’ve benefited from the data they produce for the community many times over the years. You don’t need to be an insider or to hack anything to get it. I’m not going to share links here though. o7
I understand third part sites but Gajin does not officially provide an API port for sites as far as I’m aware. I’m concerned botting is the only way to really get data on the fly. It would make sense if turning on your privacy results in public leaderboards not showing but it still doesn’t explain how they are able to get the users sessions on specific vehicles and matches if the player has all their privacy settings on without violating terms of service.
The replays only provide a replay and no where else on War Thunders official website is data be shown on what matches, games or vehicles I’m using.
I would take a look here for starters: Platform Newcomer's Brief Guide · GaijinEntertainment/gaijin-application-platform Wiki · GitHub. Statshark uses a very similar method to what’s described there. (Also note, I didn’t say there wasn’t any violation of ToS involved, that’s for Gaijin to say… I said it didn’t involve either being an insider or hacking to do it: different things.)
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Still reading through this then will get back to see. Going to day me a while.