FFI research method and evidence levels: how to judge a source

This page sets out in full how this site decides whether FFI material can be trusted: the criteria for each of the four evidence levels, why “the official page opens” cannot be treated as “currently valid”, why “the search date” cannot be treated as “the date the rule takes effect”, and how the sub-agents were divided and cross-checked. It is not a conclusions page but an operating manual — when you meet any FFI claim, you can follow the steps here to judge for yourself whether it deserves belief. What this site did not do is written at the end too, so that “we have compiled this” is not misread as “we have finished verifying it”.

How are the four evidence levels decided?

The four levels are not ordered by “how authoritative the source looks” but by whether the claim can be treated as an India-server fact. The same sentence can carry different levels on different pages: “6 hours a day” written on the India official site is India official; the same mechanic described in global patch notes is only a global reference.

Level	Decision criteria	What it may be used for	Required caveat
India official	Written directly in the body of Garena’s India site, India official announcements, India version terms or India store pages	May be cited as an India-server fact, but only the part the page states	When the page lags a patch, label the date; do not extrapolate fields it does not state
Global reference	From the Free Fire global official site, global patch notes, global customer-service articles or the global store page	May explain mechanic evolution, historical origin and design intent	Must explicitly write “global reference, not India-server tested”
Historical version	The claim appears only in the context of one patch or announcement, and later patches record changes to it	May describe the history and explain older mechanics	Must not be used for current guide conclusions
Unverified	No India official statement can be found in public material, and global material cannot be safely generalised	Only as an “unconfirmed item”	Must not be written as a specific value or assertion

When written into the body, the quote-block format for the four values is fixed as follows:

• Evidence level: India official — stated directly on Garena’s India site, announcements or store pages.
• Evidence level: Global reference — from Free Fire global official material, not usable directly as an India-server fact.
• Evidence level: Historical version — valid for the corresponding date, may have been changed by later patches.
• Evidence level: Unverified — no first-hand source yet; needs confirmation in the India client.

One point needs stating: third-party mirrors, media reports and community databases are not counted in the four levels. They can only be “lead sources”: used to find pages worth verifying, and never upgradeable to India official. This is marked separately as “third-party cross-check” in the Source index.

Why does “the official page opens” not mean “currently valid”?

This is the most commonly misunderstood rule on this site. Spot checks of the characters Ray, Ford and Chrono, plus the weapon development blog and historical patches, have already confirmed it: some official pages that load normally still carry outdated material. A page opening proves one thing only — that the server returned content at that moment; it does not prove which patch the content belongs to, nor that the patch is live on the India server.

There are four specific risks:

• Old skills left on character pages: accessible character pages for Chrono, Ford, A124, Steffie and others may still keep older skill descriptions. This site explicitly calls such material “a sourced web archive” and does not say it has been verified against current values. See Character skills catalogue.
• Old mechanics left in patch text: the M590’s explosive/splash mechanic was valid in an older announcement but was removed by a later global patch; copying the old announcement into a current guide would be wrong.
• A catalogue title is not a rule: on parts of the India support site the body text appears only in search results, and opening the page shows nothing. Seeing a catalogue title does not prove the India version has the same rule, and such entries have been re-labelled as global reference.
• The two apps cannot be mixed: the India version (FFI) and the global version (Free Fire) are two applications. A global page that opens and shows values does not mean the India client runs the same set.

Evidence level: Historical version — accessible character pages and old patch notes record “what that page said at the time”, not “what is in the client now”.

Why is the search date not the rule’s effective date?

All material on this site is uniformly labelled with the search date 2026-10-28, but that day means only “we read this page on this day”. It does not mean the rule took effect that day, nor that the rule is still valid that day. Three pitfalls already hit:

1. Announcement date differs from the date content was added: global OB55’s announcement date is 2026-09-10, while the October 1 mentioned in the text is the date some content was added. Mixing the two turns “announcement published” into “rule in effect” by mistake.
2. Release rumours precede official confirmation: media reports published before the official announcement gave a release date that was unconfirmed at the time; the later India official announcement is the final word. Even so, the announcement only proves “it was announced”, not that “the India region can already install and play it”.
3. A historical patch proves only its own time: a patch note from several years ago can prove the design of that time, not today’s values. The history is in Versions and events archive.

Evidence level: India official — the body date of the India official Play It Right page is 2026-10-27, and this site cites what the page states without inferring any other date from it.

Given a claim, judge it in six steps

1. Look at the domain and the body text, not the search snippet. Pages whose text appears in a snippet but is empty when opened are recorded separately on this site.
2. Determine region and version: is this the India site, the global site, or a third-party mirror? The India version and the global version are two applications.
3. Find the effective date, not the publication or search date. If you cannot find one, treat it as a historical version.
4. Find a second source to cross-check: India official + global reference, or announcement + patch notes. When two sources contradict each other, go to Conflicts and gaps rather than forcing a choice.
5. Set the level and write it as a quote block, so the reader can see at a glance whether the claim can be used directly.
6. Write the boundaries clearly: which fields are still unknown, which need client testing. Write what is missing as missing; do not fill it with common sense.

How were the sub-agents divided, and what did cross-checking look at?

This batch of material was investigated by several sub-agents in parallel, divided on the principle of “no overlap, no two writers on one file”:

• Characters, weapons and maps, and account troubleshooting went to different sub-agents, to avoid duplicate investigation and to avoid two people editing the same document at the same time.
• The main agent read every finished draft before finalising, and actually corrected three kinds of problem: a wrong coverage count, an unclear statement that India site body text is unreadable, and old skill descriptions being treated as current scope.
• Spot checks were not a formality: the characters Ray, Ford and Chrono plus the weapon development blog and historical patches were used specifically to verify that the “page exists, content is old” risk really does exist.
• Esports material was handled separately. When third-party results contained zero-point placeholders and contradictory rankings, unconfirmed champions or points were not written into conclusions; official livestreams can support stage schedules and participant lists, but cannot prove the current roster.

This process also explains why the entry counts on this site look “uneven”: evidence strength differs between topics, so we write as much as can be confirmed, and never pad numbers just to complete a table.

What this site deliberately does not do

• It does not claim to be a complete encyclopaedia. Character material covers 64 characters with a skill source in total (including historical characters), and current coverage is web skill profiles for those same 64 characters — 62 from the two official roster batches plus Iris and J.Biebs; that number is neither the number of selectable characters in the current India version nor a full roster.
• It does not claim to be a current values database. Weapon damage, armour interaction, loot probabilities, map rotation and similar fields have not been compared entity by entity against the latest patch, so this site does not offer a “current values” lookup.
• When client testing has not been done, it says “unverified” honestly. Actual installation in the India region, first-launch resource size, currently supported devices, frame-rate tiers and server latency all fall in this category.
• It does not treat entry counts as fact counts. Topics contain overlapping facts, so simply adding document entries does not equal the number of independent facts.
• It does not write promises it cannot keep, such as “updated daily”, “the most complete on the internet” or “100% accurate”.
• It does not upgrade third parties to official, and does not write global rules directly as India rules. The specific India restrictions (play time, guardian, spending) are in India version rules.

If you only want to confirm “how do I start playing”, begin with India server basics; if you want to know “which conclusions we are still waiting on evidence for”, go straight to Conflicts and gaps.

Sources and limitations

The method itself comes from this round of verification; the pages it can use include:

• Free Fire India official site (India official, site entry)
• India official Play It Right (India official, body date 2026-10-27)
• India official FAQ (India official, includes the 16+/17+ rating label)
• Free Fire official site (global reference)
• Official patch catalogue (global reference, patch note entry)
• India support site (India official, body text unreadable on some pages)

Still unverified: the four levels themselves are this site’s own compilation convention, not an official Garena classification; there is no unified standard for grading third-party mirrors, so this site downgrades them all to “cross-check”; and the schedule for re-testing “unverified” fields has not been set. The complete source list is in the Source index, and the raw records are in the repository file research/11-来源索引.md.