Editorial standards

Primary sources first

Where a claim can be traced to an official source — a developer’s patch notes, an official blog, a studio statement, the game itself — that is what we cite. We read the original rather than a summary of it, and we link to it so you can check.

When we report something we learned from another outlet, we say so and we credit them. We do not launder someone else’s reporting into our own voice.

Gameplay verification

Claims about how a game behaves are tested in that game before we publish them. If we say a change alters a breakpoint, someone checked. If we say a route works, someone ran it.

Where we have not been able to verify something, we say so explicitly rather than presenting an assumption as a finding. “We have not confirmed this yet” is a publishable sentence; a confident guess is not.

We do not claim firsthand experience we do not have. No invented hours played, no invented competitive history, no invented anecdotes.

Screenshots and images

We label images honestly. A screenshot captioned as ours was captured by us. We do not attribute screenshots to FPSing that we did not take, we do not use copyrighted game artwork as though it were our own, and we credit any image supplied by a third party.

Where we have no appropriate licensed image, we use original FPSing graphics rather than borrowing artwork we have no right to. Every editorial image carries alt text describing what it actually shows.

Numbers and statistics

We do not publish statistics we cannot source. No invented player counts, no invented win rates, no “most players” without something behind it. If a number comes from a specific dataset, we name the dataset and its date; if it is an estimate, we call it an estimate.

Reviews and opinion

Opinion pieces are labelled as opinion. Reviews are labelled as reviews, and disclose how the game was obtained and roughly how much of it was played before writing.

We do not publish scores. A number compresses away the part of a review that is actually useful, and it invites exactly the kind of aggregation we would rather not participate in.

Anonymous sources

We prefer named sources. Anonymity is granted only where a source faces a genuine professional or personal risk, and only when the information matters enough to justify asking a reader to trust us instead of the source.

When we do use an anonymous source, we say why anonymity was granted, we describe the source’s position closely enough to establish that they would know, and a named editor at FPSing knows their identity. We do not publish anonymous claims we cannot corroborate.

Conflicts of interest

FPSing is operated by the same ownership group as Raiderism and CODZombie. We link to them where they are the better destination for reference data, and we disclose the relationship on our About page and on every author profile.

We do not accept payment for coverage. No article on this site is sponsored, and no coverage decision is made on a commercial basis. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on the article itself and on our affiliate disclosure page before any such content is published.

Writers disclose any relationship that could reasonably be read as a conflict — working for a studio, participating in a competitive organisation, receiving anything of value from a company we cover.

Updating live-service guides

Games we cover change constantly, and a guide that was correct at publication can quietly become wrong. Our approach:

• Evergreen framing where possible. We prefer to publish the reasoning, which lasts, over the current numbers, which do not.
• Material updates are dated and labelled. When we substantively change a guide, the updated date appears on the article.
• We do not bump dates for freshness. A date change on an FPSing article means the article changed. Re-dating unchanged content to look current is a lie told to both readers and search engines, and we do not do it.
• Superseded guides are archived, not silently deleted, unless leaving them up would actively mislead.

Review before publication

Every published article is reviewed by someone other than its writer before it goes live, and a named human editor is accountable for it. That applies to pieces carrying our team byline exactly as it does to signed work.

Questions

If something here is unclear, or you think we have fallen short of it, write to editorial@fpsing.com or see our corrections policy.