Editorial Policy

Every other page here makes a version of the same promise: that what you read has been checked, and that we say so when it has not. This is the long form of that promise. It lays out how a guide gets researched, tested, written and kept honest, and the exact rules that decide what is allowed to appear on this site as fact.

One Person, One Standard

There is no content team here, no rotation of freelancers, and no pipeline turning keywords into filler. Every guide on this site is written or reviewed by one person, Rowland Cox, who has played Path of Exile since 2019. That is a real limit, and it is also the point. A single pair of hands is slower than a content mill, but it means one standard is applied to everything, and there is exactly one person to hold responsible when something is wrong.

It also means the voice does not pretend to be a committee. When a guide says something is unclear, or that a number could not be verified, that is a person telling you the truth about what they know, not a brand hedging its liability.

What A Guide Is Actually For

Most Path of Exile content explains which buttons to press. That is useful for about a week, until a patch moves the buttons. The guides here are built around a different question: what does this number mean, where did it come from, and at what point does it stop describing your character rather than an idealised one on a spreadsheet.

So a guide is finished not when it has told you what to do, but when it has told you when to stop trusting what the screen is showing you. Everything below exists to make that reliable rather than a matter of the author having a good day.

How A Guide Gets Made

Every guide moves through the same seven stages, in the same order, whether it is a two-paragraph explainer or a full walkthrough. The order matters as much as the steps, because the most common way guides go wrong is writing first and checking afterwards.

1. 01

   Read The Source First

   Before a word is written, the relevant primary source is read in full: Grinding Gear Games' developer documentation and patch notes, the platform being described, and the behaviour of the game itself. If the claim has an official answer, that answer is found before the writing starts, not retrofitted to it.

2. 02

   Do It By Hand

   Every procedure is performed in the current league, on the current patch, with the date recorded. Nothing is described from memory of how it worked last season. If a guide says a menu is in a particular place, that place was checked the week the guide was published.

3. 03

   Write From Scratch

   Examples are original and screenshots are our own. No paragraph is rewritten from another guide, no table is lifted, and no image is rehosted from another site. Where someone else explained something better, we link to them and say so rather than absorbing their work.

4. 04

   Mark The Limits

   Anywhere the data stops being reliable, the writing says so on the spot. Undisclosed thresholds, internal weighting and inferred behaviour are labelled as exactly that. Hedge language here is deliberate, not filler, and the next section is a key to what each phrase means.

5. 05

   Check Against Sources, Not Ourselves

   Before publishing, each factual claim is checked back against its original source under the sources policy. No claim is ever supported by one of our own earlier articles, because self-citation is how a site's mistakes quietly become permanent.

6. 06

   Publish With A Date

   A guide goes live carrying the date it was last verified, not a vague sense of being current. That date is a claim in itself: it says these steps worked, on this version, on this day, and it gives you something concrete to weigh when the guide is a few patches old.

7. 07

   Maintain It

   Every guide that depends on a source is flagged for review when that source changes, and again at each league start. Anything that cannot be re-verified is marked rather than left looking fresh. Corrections are made in the open and logged under the corrections policy.

The Rules That Decide What Counts As Fact

The process above is the routine. These are the lines that do not bend, the ones that decide whether a sentence is allowed to be stated as fact or has to be softened, sourced or cut. If a draft cannot satisfy all six, the claim comes out.

How We Mark What We Are Not Sure About

Some things about Path of Exile and community tools genuinely are not documented anywhere. Internal weighting, exact filtering thresholds and undisclosed implementation details fall into that gap, and no amount of confident writing turns a reasonable guess into a fact. Rather than hide that behind smooth prose, specific phrases are used to mark it, and each one means something precise. When you see them here, they are doing real work.

On Using AI

A guide site that stayed quiet about this in 2026 would be hiding the obvious question, so here is a straight answer. The line is simple and it does not move: a language model is never the source of anything factual on this site, and nothing is published that a person has not checked against a primary source and, where relevant, tested by hand.

Independence, Money And Conflicts

What a site earns from should never change what it tells you, so the arrangement is kept plain. There are no paid guides, no sponsored content dressed up as editorial, and no placement bought on any recommendation. If a build, a tool or an approach is described as good, that is because it is good, and for no other reason.

The full account of how this site makes money, including anything on advertising and affiliate links, lives on the about page and is kept honest there. The editorial commitment is the part that matters here: nothing on the revenue side is allowed to reach into a guide and change what it says.

Corrections And Freshness

Something here will be wrong eventually. Patches move limits, interfaces get redesigned, and occasionally a source is simply misread. When that happens the fix is dated, the old version is described rather than erased, and how long the error was live is recorded. The grading, the timelines and what a correction note actually looks like are all set out in the corrections policy.

Freshness is treated as part of accuracy, not a separate nicety. A guide that was correct a year ago and has not been touched since is not automatically still correct, and it is not presented as though it were.

What This Policy Will Not Do

Being open to correction is not the same as being editable by whoever asks loudest. A few things stay fixed regardless of who is unhappy about them.

• Accurate information does not come down because someone dislikes it. That includes anything unflattering about a build, a tool, or the limits of the data sitting behind it.
• Disagreement is not error. If the facts are right and you think the judgement is wrong, that is a comment worth reading, but it is not logged as a mistake.
• Coverage is never traded. No link, payment or relationship changes whether something is written about, how it is described, or how quickly it is fixed.
• Nothing is backdated or quietly deleted. A page that has been wrong is more useful with a visible correction on it than gone, and a correction always carries the date it was actually made.