Reading this site means accepting the description of it set out below. If any part of that description is unacceptable, the correct response is to stop reading, which requires no notice to us and costs you nothing.
An independent desk measuring one narrow property of online games: whether their servers can describe the game their designers built. Every figure published here comes from our own test machines, on retail builds bought with our own funds, using the procedure set out on the method page.
A number on this site is a judgement about network behaviour and nothing else. It does not assess art, writing, balance, difficulty, value or whether you will enjoy a game. A title can score 6.4 here and be the best thing you play this year, and our Banner Fields review says so explicitly.
The titles discussed on this site are fictional, created for the purpose of illustrating measurement techniques and the arguments arising from them. Any resemblance to an actual product is coincidental and unintended. The numbers attached to them are demonstrations of the method rather than claims about any real game.
We take care with the figures and we publish the procedure so that a disagreement can be about evidence. That said, measurement of a live service from outside it is inherently partial. We can tell you what our packets did on our connections at a given hour; we cannot tell you what the server was doing internally or why.
Errors are fixed in place with the previous figure left visible, and score revisions are stamped at the top of the affected review. Our logs page also carries a withdrawn finding, retained with the reason for withdrawal, because the record of being wrong is part of the evidence.
No review access, no early builds, no travel, no sponsored placements and no affiliate links. Every game measured here was purchased in the same way any reader would purchase it. Where a studio has contacted us to dispute a figure, we have re-measured and published the result whichever way it fell.
Quote what is useful, with attribution and a link to the page. Reproducing a whole review or log in full elsewhere is not permitted. If you want to reuse a table of figures in your own research, that is fine provided the source and the date of measurement travel with it, because a tick rate without a date is not information.
This material is offered for interest and as a demonstration of technique. Nothing here is advice about a purchase, an investment or an engineering decision, and no responsibility is accepted for actions taken on the basis of anything published on this site.
These terms may be updated as the publication changes. The current version is always the one on this page, and material changes to how we measure will appear on the method page at the same time.
