The MMO Codex editorial desk

Mission

We publish guides that stay useful for longer than a news cycle: builds and the reasoning behind them, in-game economies and what actually moves them, progression routes, and endgame checklists. Twelve games get this treatment — World of Warcraft, Path of Exile 1 and 2, Old School RuneScape, Final Fantasy XIV, Black Desert, The Elder Scrolls Online, Albion Online, Guild Wars 2, Throne and Liberty, Warframe and Scars of Honor — and each is a shelf of its own rather than a tag.

A game earns a shelf here by having a patch cycle worth tracking, and loses one when that stops: we do not write guides for a game with a shutdown date on it. Two shelves are deliberate exceptions and we would rather say so than let you find out. Warframe is not an MMORPG — it is a co-op live-service shooter, and it is here because the questions it generates are the same ones this site answers. Scars of Honor has not released; everything filed under it is pre-launch coverage, labelled as such, and none of it is a guide.

We deliberately do not publish patch-day news, tier lists presented as fact, or drama. A tier list is a snapshot of what people are playing; a guide is an explanation of why something works, and only the second one is still worth reading in a month.

Methodology

• A guide is drafted from recorded gameplay of the thing it describes, read together with the game’s own patch notes and reference pages for the version in question. Where those two disagree, the patch notes win and the guide says so.
• Every guide names the game version it was written against, and that version is shown on the guide itself. A claim about a build or a price is only ever a claim about one patch.
• Where a guide is built on someone else’s footage or write-up, that source is credited in the guide, by name, where a reader can see it.
• When the named version stops being current, the guide is revised or its version stamp is left standing so the reader can see how old the advice is. We would rather show a date than quietly imply a guide is current.

Editorial standards

• Numbers carry their conditions. A currency ratio is worth nothing without the league and the week it was observed in; a damage figure is worth nothing without the gear it assumes.
• A guide says what it is uncertain about. “This is the consensus and it has not been tested past week two” is a useful sentence; omitting it is not.
• No affiliate links, no paid placements, and no coverage bought by a publisher. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before it appears in a guide.
• Corrections are made in the guide itself and dated on the changelog, not quietly edited away.

Contact

Corrections are the most useful thing you can send us: if a guide is wrong, or has gone stale against a patch, tell us which guide and which patch and we will fix or re-stamp it.

Write to contact@mmo-codex.com. It is read by the people who write the guides, not by a support queue.