I grade every game fact A, B or C before it goes live

I once published a description of a feature that did not exist.

It was a small thing — a paragraph explaining that a tool accepted a URL parameter it had never accepted. Nobody complained. I found it myself, three days later, while reading my own page trying to remember why I had written it. The feature was plausible. It fit the rest of the product. I had clearly assumed it into existence somewhere between "this would be useful" and "this is how it works."

That was the moment I stopped trusting my own drafting process for factual claims, and started grading them.

Game guides are unusually good at generating wrong facts

If you write about a game, you are working with four sources that look interchangeable and are not:

1. The store page — price, release date, platforms, player count. Authoritative, but sparse and occasionally stale.
2. In-game testing — the truth, if you actually did it, on the build you actually ran.
3. Other guide sites — fast, plentiful, and frequently copied from each other, so "three sources agree" can mean one source repeated three times.
4. Community chatter — ahead of everything else and wrong maybe a third of the time.

The dangerous mix is 2 and 3. A number you measured yourself and a number you read on another fan site feel identical by the time they reach your draft. One is evidence. The other is a rumour with good formatting.

The three tiers

Every claim on the site now gets sorted before it gets published.

Tier A — hard facts. Checkable against a primary source. I write the source and the date I checked it, on the page, visible to readers.

What lives here: price, release date, platforms, player count, module counts, review score. All of it traces back to the store page or the store's API, with a re-check date attached.

The rule that actually matters: a Tier A claim without a date is not a Tier A claim. It is a memory. Prices change, platforms get added, review scores move. An undated fact is a fact about the past that the reader will apply to the present.

Tier B — how-to content. Needs at least two independent sources agreeing before it gets published as fact.

What lives here: solving rules, role techniques, which modules appear together on which level, timing behaviour. This is the bulk of a guide site, and it is where the copying problem bites hardest. Two sites agreeing is not two sources if one of them is reading the other. So "independent" is doing real work in that sentence — I have to be able to say where each of the two came from, and they cannot share an ancestor.

Tier C — unconfirmed. Not published as fact. Either left out entirely, or written explicitly as "unannounced" or "not confirmed."

This is the tier that took me longest to accept, because it is the one that costs traffic. Console release dates. Mobile crossplay. Per-level walkthroughs. Unreleased content. All of it is high-volume search demand, and all of it is speculation wearing a headline. The honest version of those pages is a paragraph saying we do not know yet, which ranks for nothing.

So most of Tier C simply does not get written.

What grading actually changed

Three things, in order of how much they surprised me.

The site got smaller. Fewer pages, shorter pages. Several drafts I was happy with got cut down to a sentence or dropped, because I could not get a second independent source for the part that made them interesting.

Errors got cheaper to fix. When a claim carries a tier and a source, a correction is a two-minute edit: change the number, change the date. When a claim is buried in flowing prose with no provenance, a correction means re-reading the whole page and wondering what else came from the same unreliable place.

"I don't know" turned out to be a usable answer. Not as a cop-out — as a labelled state. A reader who is told "this is confirmed" and "this is unconfirmed" can make their own call. A reader who is told everything in the same confident voice cannot.

The part that does not scale

Grading is slow, and it does not get faster with volume. Every Tier A number needs a re-check eventually. Every Tier B claim needs its two sources named. The maintenance cost is permanent, because the underlying facts move whether or not you touch the page.

There is a temptation to relax the rules once traffic arrives — to let a plausible number through because the page is already written and the keyword is already targeted. That is exactly the moment the tiers stop meaning anything. A grading system you override when it is inconvenient is not a system, it is a style.

The rules I use, including the exact wording of each tier and what falls into it, are written down on the site rather than kept in my head: the fact-grading rules in full. Publishing them turned out to be useful in a way I did not expect — it makes overriding them a visible decision rather than a quiet one.

If you write about anything with moving parts, the tiers do not need to be three, and they do not need to be mine. They need to be written down somewhere before the draft, not reconstructed afterwards.