Editorial policy

Principles

AFK Journal exists to answer questions about games accurately and quickly. Four commitments follow from that, and everything further down this page is an application of one of them.

• Show the evidence. A claim that matters is linked to something you can check for yourself.
• Say what is not known. Where the answer is uncertain, unconfirmed or contested, the page says so rather than picking the confident-sounding version.
• Keep pages current. Games change. A guide that no longer matches the game is a mistake, not merely an old page, and when one is found it is updated or marked, with the change recorded in that page's update log.
• Separate reporting from judgement. News reports. Reviews judge, and show the reasoning. The two are never blended to make a headline work.

Sourcing

News is written from the primary source wherever one exists — the developer's or publisher's own announcement, patch notes, storefront page, or broadcast — and that source is linked inline rather than named in passing. When another outlet broke a story, it is credited and linked; the story is not laundered into an unattributed report.

Guides are built from the developer's own documentation and patch notes, from the game's official channels, and from named community resources, and they state the version of the game they were written against. Where a guide relies on community testing — drop rates, frame data, damage numbers — the page says so and links where the testing was done, because that is evidence of a different weight than a patch note.

Posts carry a sources list when they rely on outside material, and the sources are linked inline as well, so a statement can be checked against the document it came from without leaving the page. Figures that move — player counts, prices, patch versions, aggregate review scores — are given with the date they were true, so a stale number reads as stale rather than as a fact. Rumours and leaks are labelled as such in the headline and the opening lines, with the track record of the source described rather than assumed.

Reviews and the score

Reviews on this site are evidence-based roundups. They read the published criticism and the visible player sentiment about a game, quote and link the outlets and communities they draw on, and then reach a single conclusion and a single score of our own.

Two limits on that, stated up front:

• We never present another outlet's score, or an aggregate of them, as our rating.Aggregate numbers from review aggregators may be described in the text as context, clearly attributed. Our score is our own judgement of the evidence, and it is the only rating this site marks up as a rating.
• We do not claim first-hand play. A review here is a reading of the evidence, not a hands-on impression, and it never writes as though it were one. The platforms it names are the platforms the cited reviews covered. If that ever changes, the review will say so.

The scale runs from 1 to 10 in tenths. It is a judgement of the whole game as it stands today, not a weighted average of categories, and it carries a label so the number is never read without its meaning.

A score is attached to a moment. When a game changes enough that the verdict no longer holds — a major patch, a relaunch, a server shutdown — the review is either re-scored with the change noted in its update log, or it is left alone and labelled as a review of the launch version. Scores are never edited silently.

Corrections

Mistakes get corrected in the open. A factual error is fixed in the body of the page and recorded in that page's update log with the date and what changed, so the edit is visible to anyone who read the earlier version.

• Factual errors — corrected and logged. If the error changed the meaning of the piece, the note says what the page previously claimed.
• Developing stories — updated in place with a dated note, rather than republished as new posts.
• Typos and broken links — fixed without a note; nothing about the substance has changed.
• Retractions — if a post should not have been published, it stays up with a clear retraction at the top rather than disappearing.

Ethics, funding and independence

• No paid coverage. Nothing on this site is sold. Coverage, placement and scores cannot be bought, and no publisher or developer is given copy approval or an advance look at a verdict.
• Affiliate links: none currently. There are no affiliate links, referral links or tracked store links anywhere on the site today. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed here and marked on the pages that carry them, before they go live.
• No advertising and no sponsored posts. The site carries no ad slots and no sponsored content.
• Review copies: none. This site receives no review copies, press codes or publisher-provided access, and no review here is written from any. If that ever changes, the review will say so, and being given a copy would buy nothing else.
• Conflicts. Where there is any relationship with a game, studio or person being covered, the post discloses it in the piece itself.

Feedback

Corrections, disagreements and tips are all welcome, and a correction request is read as a correction request rather than as criticism.

A published contact address is not live yet, which means there is currently no way to send a correction request to this site. That is a gap, it is stated here rather than papered over with a form that goes nowhere, and the contact page will carry the address as soon as there is one.

Bylines

Every post is published under the organization byline AFK Journal Staff. There are no individual author names, and no author pages.

This is a description of how the work is actually made. Research, drafting, editing and source checking here are a single process rather than one person's signature, and putting a personal name on a page to satisfy a convention would be the less transparent choice. Publishing under the masthead means the publication, not an individual, is accountable for every page.

What replaces the byline is the rest of this page: sources you can follow, dates you can check, a scale you can read, an update log on pages that change, and a correction process. Those are the things a byline is a proxy for, and they are stated directly instead.

AI disclosure

Research and drafting on this site are AI-assisted, and that is true of every section, not of a subset. Pages are produced by automated publishing pipelines that the site's editor configures, runs and is answerable for: the pipeline gathers the material, drafts the page and files it for publication.

What that means in practice:

• AI tools gather the source material, draft the structure and the prose, and prepare the summaries. Nothing here is presented as having been written any other way.
• Claims are sourced rather than asserted. The material a page was built from is linked inline and listed at the foot of the page, so you can check a statement against the document it came from instead of taking the page's word for it.
• Figures that move carry the date they were true, so an out-of-date number can be recognised as one.
• Scores and verdicts are derived from the published evidence the review cites, against the scale set out above — not produced as an unexplained number.
• When an error is found, by a reader or on a later pass over the page, it is corrected and recorded in that page's update log under the corrections process above.

The standard this site holds itself to is the one that applies to any other tool: the process does not excuse the output. If a page is wrong, it is wrong, and it is corrected under the process above. Linking the evidence is what makes that checkable from outside, which is why it is the commitment this page leads with.

What is covered

Coverage is organised around games rather than around a publishing calendar, and each game's posts are collected on its own hub — see the games index. A hub is offered to search engines only once it holds four posts across at least two sections and an introduction written for this site; thinner hubs still exist and still work, they are simply not presented as destinations before they are.