Writing
Why every guide on this site has a patch number on it
Game guides go stale faster than almost any other writing, and most never tell you when they were written. Here is the fix this site is built around.
1d ago2 min read
You search for how to do something in a game. You get a page. It reads confidently. You follow it for forty minutes before working out that the building it tells you to unlock was moved two patches ago and the numbers it quotes are from a version that no longer exists.
Nothing on the page told you that. There was no date, or there was a date that turned out to be when a stock photo got swapped.
The structural reason this happens
Guide content is expensive to write and nearly free to leave up. A page that ranks keeps earning whether or not it is still true, and updating it costs the same as writing it did. So the incentive is to publish, rank, and move on.
The second-order effect is worse. Because updated pages and abandoned pages look identical from the outside, there is no way for a reader to tell them apart, which means there is no reward for being the site that updates. A site that re-verifies its work looks exactly like a site that does not.
What this site does about it
Every guide, comparison, and tool page here carries a stamp with three facts:
- Patch. The game version the page was written against.
- Checked. The last date the page was read back against the live game. Not the publish date, and not the date a typo was fixed.
- Tested in game. Shown only when the claims were confirmed by playing rather than read off patch notes or a wiki.
That third one is the uncomfortable one, and it is the one that matters most. A guide assembled from patch notes can be perfectly accurate. It can also confidently describe a mechanic that does not behave the way the notes imply, which happens constantly. Saying which kind of page you are reading is the least a guide can do.
What the stamp does not promise
It does not promise the page is right. A one-person site will sometimes be behind, and a page checked last week can still be wrong about something subtle.
What it promises is that you can see the age of what you are reading before you spend time on it. Given the alternative is a page with no date at all, that turns out to be most of the value.
The RSS feed sorts by verification date
A small consequence worth mentioning: the feed here is ordered by when a page was last checked, not when it was first published. A guide re-verified for a new patch resurfaces, because for anyone playing that game it is genuinely new information.
That is the whole idea. Freshness is the product.