The ranking,explained.

Hours.gg publishes combined ranking hours: the weighted total used to order each exact board.

This value is not product-use time, a player count, ownership, adoption or market share.

combined_ranking_hours = protected_foundation_hours + eligible_verified_playtime_contribution

Protected foundation hours

Immutable founding values admitted to the exact board by a versioned membership decision.

Eligible connected weight

Capped exact-game contribution from current eligible connected setup records for the same board.

The displayed total combines a protected foundation input with capped, eligible Steam-verified game-hour contributions.

The ranking begins with a completely frozen synthetic baseline. It is permanently immutable and contributes ranking hours, but it does not represent a real player, vote, review, pledge, or product-use duration.

Those protected numeric values cannot be raised, lowered, rebalanced, reassigned, regenerated, or deleted. A reviewed correction can append a label or membership-state decision, but it cannot alter the value.

• +This methodology is the canonical disclosure for the protected foundation input.
• +Public ranking pages do not expose foundation composition or quantities.
• +A foundation row never creates connected evidence, a setup count, or an individual evidence item.
• +A board-scope change is append-only, attributable, and release-gated.

Verified Steam playtime belongs to the connected evidence layer. It contributes capped game hours to the combined ranking total without becoming product-use duration.

connected_hours_weight = Σ min(exact_game_hours, 4,000)

For this connected-only calculation, each eligible record contributes the lesser of its exact observed game hours and 4,000.

The cap controls contribution math. It does not estimate how long any product was used.

• +Exact observed game hours are uncapped source evidence at a stated observation time.
• +The connected contribution cap is ranking math, not a product-use timer.
• +Observed game hours do not establish skill, expertise, rank, credibility, or worth.
• +Anonymous ranking and consent-gated exact evidence use separate projections.

One eligible connected setup is one current eligible setup record for the exact Steam account, game, and category at the stated cutoff. A report states the board, method version, cutoff, and setup denominator.

The observable record is not silently merged, split, or relabelled as a headcount or market-uptake measure.

No single threshold unlocks every claim. Each claim policy binds an exact metric, cohort, denominator, observation window, freshness rule, suppression rule, permitted wording, limitations, approval, and activation state.

All policy rows below are unratified and blocked for production use. This page documents the court; it does not activate a claim.

F-003 approves product direction under which a documented legacy deliberate pledge may contribute to anonymous aggregate ranking. It does not authorize named Steam identity publication, exact individual-hours publication, optional profile fields, research use, or enterprise use.

New named, exact, optional-field, research, or enterprise surfaces require the applicable current versioned consent scope. One scope never silently implies another.

A claim is withheld unless its exact source projection is available, current enough for the policy, complete, privacy-safe, approved, and active. Missing evidence does not become a displayed zero.

Anonymous board

Identity-free product order, combined ranking hours, projection version, data cutoff, and material-change time.

Consent-gated evidence

A separate exact-evidence surface containing only fields authorized by current matching scopes.

Material time

The last genuine data or method change, kept separate from a generated timestamp.

Unavailable state

An explicit hold, empty state, or degradation reason—never an improvised ranking claim.

• +Visible copy and structured data use the same metric definition.
• +A generated timestamp cannot create a freshness claim.
• +Exact primary-score ties use a deterministic versioned order without exposing seed inputs or controls.
• +Payment is not an input to rank.