Why a Banner Tracker Needs an Evidence-State Model

Live-service game guides have a difficult data problem: the most searched question is often the least stable one. A player wants to know the current banner, what comes next, and when the phase changes. Those answers can become wrong within hours, while community speculation can look almost identical to confirmed information in a feed. I approached this as a state-modeling problem rather than a stream of blog posts. The key is to store what is known, how it is known, and when the snapshot was rebuilt as separate fields. Use explicit evidence states A banner record should not be either “published” or “missing.” It needs an evidence state: confirmed official notice or in-game Convene data supports the lineup and dates watchlist a version mention or community signal exists, but the lineup is not official historical a completed phase retained for rerun and sequence research This prevents a generic version-number mention from silently becoming a future b