How we compare

A comparison is only useful if the reader can see what was measured and what was left out. This page is the rulebook the rest of the site follows: the questions every entry answers, the sources those answers may come from, the rule that fixes the order of the table, and the judgements this site declines to make.

Why the method is written down first

Comparison pages for games usually fail in one of two ways. Either they assign scores that have no visible basis, so that an eight and a seven separate two games for reasons nobody can reconstruct, or they describe every game in enthusiastic general terms that would fit any title in the category. Both approaches produce text that reads well and tells the reader nothing they can act on.

The alternative taken here is narrower and duller, and it works better. Every game is described against a fixed set of questions. If the publisher has answered a question publicly, the entry repeats the answer and links to where it was found. If the publisher has not, the entry says the information is not stated. A reader who wants a verdict will not find one; a reader who wants to know whether two games ask for the same kind of evening will.

The six questions every entry answers

These are asked in the same order in every entry, which is what makes two entries comparable by reading them in parallel.

1. What does the player control?

The vehicle classes available, and whether they appear in the same battles or in separate modes. This is the question that separates a tank game from a game with tanks in it. Where a game includes infantry alongside vehicles, that is recorded here too, because it changes what a match feels like at a basic level.

2. How is a match structured?

Whether battles are player against player, player against computer-controlled opponents, cooperative, or a mixture; roughly how a session is bounded; and whether the game offers difficulty or realism settings that change the handling model. A single game with three realism settings is effectively three games for the purposes of this question, and the entry says so.

3. What does it ask of a computer and a connection?

The existence and location of the publisher's stated system requirements, and any published guidance on connection quality. Pioneer Point does not reproduce specific hardware numbers, because they change with each update and a stale figure is worse than no figure. The entry links the page where the current numbers live. Connection matters in this category more than in most: Australian players are often routed to servers in Asia, Europe or North America, and latency shapes gunnery in a way that raw frame rate does not.

4. What does an account require?

Whether registration happens on a website or inside the client, whether an email address must be confirmed, and whether the publisher offers multi-factor authentication. The last part is the one worth checking before you invest a hundred hours in a progression tree.

5. How does money enter the game?

The mechanisms present: premium currency, direct purchase of vehicles or modules, time-limited subscriptions, cosmetic items, and randomised bundles whose contents are unknown before purchase. Prices are not listed on this site at any point. They vary by region and change without notice, and a price written here in September is a small lie by December.

6. Where does the publisher's own information sit?

A direct link to the official website, so the reader can confirm anything on this page at the source. Every entry has one, and no entry relies on a claim that cannot be checked there.

Where the facts in an entry come from

There are exactly two permitted sources for a statement about a specific game. The first is the publisher's own public material: the official website, the published requirements page, the account or support pages. The second is an Australian government body writing in its own area of responsibility, which is why the Australian Classification Board is linked for classification questions and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for questions about purchases and refunds.

Nothing else qualifies. Community wikis, forum threads, video walkthroughs and aggregated review scores are all excluded, not because they are worthless but because they cannot be held to account. Where a question has no answer in a permitted source, the entry records that the information is not stated and stops there. Blank cells in the comparison table are deliberate.

What sets the order of the table

The comparison table is sorted alphabetically by game title. That is the whole rule. It is not sorted by popularity, by how recently a game was updated, by any internal preference, and specifically not by whether a commercial relationship exists. Alphabetical order was chosen because it is the only ordering a reader can verify at a glance and reproduce themselves, which means it cannot be quietly bent later.

Within an entry, the six questions never change order either. If a game has an unusually interesting answer to question five, it still appears fifth.

Three things this site does not do

1. No scores or star ratings. A number implies a measurement. There is no measurement behind an opinion about a game, and dressing one up as 8.4 out of 10 makes it harder to argue with, not more accurate.
2. No ranking of one game above another. The games in this library are not competing to be the same thing. A study simulator and an arcade vehicle shooter serve different evenings and different budgets, and a list that puts one above the other is answering a question nobody asked.
3. No description of how a game feels to play. Pioneer Point does not publish play impressions, reviews or personal accounts. The site's editorial work is checking, recording and linking, and pretending otherwise would misrepresent what is behind these pages.

Those three refusals cut out most of what makes a games site entertaining. They also remove every place where an undisclosed commercial interest could hide, which is the trade deliberately made here.

How commercial relationships are handled

Pioneer Point earns money from one game in this library and no others. War Thunder is covered under an affiliate arrangement: a reader who follows the paid link, registers an account, confirms the email address and signs in to the game generates a fixed commission for Kalos investing s.r.o. The other four entries carry no commercial relationship, and their links to publisher websites earn nothing.

The rules that keep this from bleeding into the writing are simple and stated so that a reader can check them. A paid relationship does not change a game's position in the table, because the order is alphabetical. It does not add criteria that flatter one entry, because the criteria are fixed and apply to all five. It does not license claims that could not be made about any other game: the War Thunder entry is restricted to what the publisher states publicly, exactly like the rest. And every paid link is labelled where it sits, not only on the disclosure page.

What a reader should conclude from this is limited but real: the presence of a game in this library is not an endorsement, and the presence of a paid link tells you how the site is funded rather than which game is better. The affiliate disclosure sets out the arrangement in full.

Paid link. A live example of the labelling rule: Visit the War Thunder website ↗ is a paid link, and the sentence you are reading is the label that accompanies it wherever it appears.

Review dates and corrections

Every page carries a review date in the footer. A review means each publisher link was opened and confirmed to still resolve to the official site, and each entry was read against the publisher's current public material. Pages are reviewed on a quarterly cycle, and a page that has not been reviewed within that period keeps its older date rather than having the date refreshed to look current. A stale date is information; a false one is not.

Corrections are welcome and are handled by email to info@pioneerpoint.online. If something on this site is wrong, the useful message names the page and quotes the sentence. Where a correction changes a fact rather than fixing a typographical error, the page is updated and its review date is moved forward.

Adding and removing games

A game belongs in this library if it meets three conditions: the player's primary unit is a vehicle rather than a person, battles involve other human players or the publisher describes online play as a core mode, and the publisher maintains a current official website in English. The library is deliberately small, because five entries kept current are more use than thirty entries copied once and left to rot.

A game is removed if its official site goes dark, if the publisher announces the end of service, or if it stops meeting the first condition after a redesign. Removal is not a judgement about quality. When an entry is removed, the table's caption records the review date on which the change was made.

Requests to add a game can be sent to the same address. Pioneer Point does not accept payment for inclusion, and a request from a publisher is treated exactly like a request from a reader: it is checked against the three conditions and answered.