POLYTRACK, MEASURED
How we test: four marks, one rule
A number appears here only if we read it off the screen during a dated session, or if we are quoting the game or its listing and saying which. The marks do not rank sources by how impressive they are: a quoted line is often the most useful thing on the page, because it is what the game promises before you drive.
The five marks
| Mark | Means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| TESTED | We saw it in a session, and the page carries the date. | a lap time, a checkpoint count |
| IN-GAME | Text the client itself prints, quoted word for word. | “按 T / Backspace 再试一次” |
| OFFICIAL ONLY | The developer or the store listing says it. We repeat it as their claim. | “7 official summer tracks” |
| NEEDS CHECK | We know it exists; the details have not been read off the screen. | the editor’s piece limit |
| COMMUNITY INDEX | A third party published it. We repeat it as theirs, with a date. | “4 to 32 checkpoints” |
How a session works
- the client is opened on a dated session and the version string is photographed
- the track list is captured once, unedited, so names and counts come from the game rather than from memory
- each measurement is a screenshot of the counter, not a stopwatch on a phone
- anything we could not reproduce is written down as not reproduced
How the marks stack
Where a page mixes them, it says which block is which rather than averaging them: the track table is TESTED because every cell came off the screen, and the sentence above it is OFFICIAL ONLY because it is the listing’s claim about the seasons. Neither cancels the other.
What we will not do
We will not publish a track length we estimated from a screenshot of a map, a lap time we did not record, or an editor limit we did not hit. If a page is thin because the measurement has not happened, it says so at the top.
Revision and removal
Pages carry the date they were last measured, and a page that has not been retested after an update says so instead of keeping an old number in the same voice as a fresh one. If a client changes under us, the old measurement is not deleted: it is moved into a line that says what it used to be and when, because a number that silently changes is worse than a number marked stale.
What a dated claim looks like
Two examples, both from other games we run guides for, because they show the shape: an update list that runs back to 2014 while the store says the game released in 2025 — both are true, and the page reports both rather than picking the tidier one; and a store advertising 56 locations where the community wiki’s own categories add up to 57 — the page prints the disagreement instead of averaging it.
Here, the same rule means a PolyTrack page can say “17 tracks” and “names unknown” in the same sentence. That is not a hedge; it is the difference between the store’s count and our reading, and a reader can act on the first without trusting the second.