How we source and verify game data

Every data block on this site is tagged with one of four levels. The levels are deliberately uneven: most of the interesting information about game economies cannot reach the top one, and pretending otherwise would be the single easiest way to make this site worthless.

Official first-party

The number comes from the publisher's own public interface, or from a figure read directly out of the game. EVE Online's PLEX market is official: CCP exposes it through ESI. Guild Wars 2's Gem exchange is official: ArenaNet publishes it through an official, keyless API. Roblox player counts are official: they come from Roblox's own public API and we show the timestamp we read them at. If a game is playable by a machine account, its numbers can be official here.

Cross-checked two independent sources

No official feed exists, but at least two sources that did not copy each other agree — typically a community wiki and a data mirror, or two wikis with different editors. This is the realistic ceiling for most in-game prices: publishers rarely expose them, so verification means finding genuinely independent confirmation rather than a higher authority.

Single-source one source, unexplained

One credible source, nothing to corroborate it. A page built on this level still ships, but it carries the label, and the reader is told which specific claims rest on it. We would rather publish a usable number, clearly flagged, than publish nothing and pretend the subject does not exist.

Estimate arithmetic, not a reading

Nobody has confirmed the input, so the output is a derived guess. The clearest current example is the Albion Online USD conversion: the Gold-to-Silver rate is solid, but the store price used to turn Silver into dollars was never checked against Sandbox Interactive's own store page, so the dollar figure on that page is an estimate and says so in three places.

The +1 Wings For Eggs planner is the clearest illustration of how this works in practice, because it puts two very different kinds of data on a single screen.

The player figures — concurrent players, total visits, favourites, the game's release date — are official. They come from Roblox's public API, refresh hourly, and the panel shows the reading timestamp. We can be exact about them because a first party told us.

The wing prices are single-source. Nobody publishes a Roblox game's internal shop economy through an API; there is no equivalent of ESI for a tycoon game's upgrade ladder. So the table was assembled from publicly listed information and cross-referenced against a second listing of the same ladder, which is enough to agree on its shape and not enough to certify any individual tier. Both facts are on the page, in that order: we state plainly that the numbers are unconfirmed, and we say what to do about it — check the price in your own shop before spending.

The reason this matters is not pedantry. A player who trusts a wrong price grinds for hours toward a target that does not exist. A player who is told the price is unconfirmed checks it in fifteen seconds and then trusts the arithmetic built on top of it. The label converts a correctness problem into a workflow, which is the only honest thing a third-party site can do.

The tempting move is to fill the gap. An upgrade ladder with eight tiers looks better than one with five, so you estimate the missing three and move on. We do not do this, for a specific reason: a fabricated number and a verified number are indistinguishable once they are on the same page, and the fabrication contaminates everything computed from it. If a solver's answer depends on a guessed tier, the answer is a guess wearing a decimal point.

So when data is missing, the page shows the gap. The live market pages have a standing state — "the rate appears once the hourly pipeline has written its first price snapshots — no fabricated numbers, ever" — that renders instead of a chart when the pipeline has nothing. It is worse for the page and better for the reader, and we take that trade every time.

• Never invent a number to fill a layout. A blank, an em dash or an explicit "collecting data" state is always preferred to a plausible-looking figure with no source behind it.
• Never let sample data reach production. The charts on this site can be rendered from synthetic data while developing — that is what makes the layout testable. The code path that does this is switched off by environment and can only run outside production, so a fabricated price cannot be served to a reader even by accident.
• Never quietly modernise a stale date. If a figure was last confirmed in August, the page says August, even if it is still the best number available and the page looks dusty because of it. Updating the date without re-checking the price is the most common lie on data sites precisely because it costs nothing to tell.
• Never imply a feed is first-party when it is not. Albion's prices, for instance, come from a community-run aggregation project, not from Sandbox Interactive. The publisher has publicly said it does not object to the project, which is not the same as endorsing it, and the methodology page says so in those words.

The most useful thing a reader can send us is a number that is wrong, with a screenshot of where the right one lives. Corrections are the cheapest form of verification available to a site that cannot log into the game, and they upgrade a tier's confidence level directly: two independent confirmations is exactly what moves a row from single-source to cross-checked.

If you find an error, tell us which page and which figure. We will re-check it, change it, and move the date forward — and if the correction changes a recommendation a solver produced, the recommendation changes with it, because the prose on our tool pages is generated from the same data the solver reads rather than written alongside it.