Claims about our own games
These are checked against the source code, which is the authority. When a guide says that a perfect ward burn in Wizard Run is worth 300 points, that figure is in the game's scoring table. When it says a telegraph never drops below 0.55 seconds, that floor is in the code.
The build process helps enforce this. Each game's HUD declaration is compared against the slots its code actually writes to, every game is booted and driven in a headless browser before release, and the build fails rather than shipping a catalogue that disagrees with the games.
Where a guide describes how something feels rather than what it does, it is written after playing the game, and it is phrased as a judgement rather than as a measurement.
General claims about games or people
Claims about human performance - reaction times, learning rates - are kept general, described as approximate, and used only as context for a mechanic. Where a guide says visual reaction time bottoms out somewhere around two hundred milliseconds, that is offered as a rough and widely cited figure, not as a precise finding.
We do not manufacture precision. A made-up percentage is worse than no percentage, and a survey we did not run is worse than both.
Claims about the history of arcade games are kept to things that are uncontroversial and verifiable, and phrased conservatively where they are not.
Numbers we will never publish
How many people play a game here. We cannot measure it, so any figure would be invented.
Global high scores, rankings or leaderboards, for the same reason.
Star ratings, review scores or user testimonials. There is no mechanism to collect them.
Traffic figures, market statistics or survey results that we did not produce and cannot attribute.
Review before publication
Every guide is checked against the code a second time before it is published, specifically for numbers: point values, timings, thresholds and names.
Every guide's cross-links are verified automatically. The build fails if a guide links to a game or another guide that does not exist, which means a broken internal link cannot reach the live site.
Every game referenced by a guide is confirmed to have a working, playable module before the build completes.
Corrections
If we publish something wrong, we fix it. Factual errors are corrected as soon as we know about them and the page's updated date moves.
Where a correction changes the substance of the advice rather than a detail, the guide says what changed rather than being quietly edited. A reader who acted on the old version is entitled to know.
If a game changes in a way that makes a guide wrong, the guide is updated in the same release where possible and shortly after where not.
Telling us we are wrong
Corrections from readers are welcome and useful. The contact page has a 'Guide correction' subject for exactly this.
The most useful correction names the guide, quotes the passage and says what the correct behaviour is. If you have a repeatable way to demonstrate it, better still.