Guides are never merged

	question	safe
grouping	which systems are about blue gems	yes — nothing is combined
merging	what tier is seed 387, overall	no — one guide’s Tier 1 is another’s Tier 2

Every response keeps each guide’s own scale intact, side by side, and a verdict is always reported against its own list:

seed 387, AK-47 Case Hardened
  2941982575  "AK-47 Blue Gem"     level "1" (Rank 1)   2nd of 4 levels
  3313951742  "Gold Gem Patterns"  not listed

“2nd of 4” is safe because it describes that guide’s own list only. No cross-guide tier is ever computed or emitted.

No averaged tier

If one number is ever needed across guides, it will be agreement — how many guides on a topic list the seed, and how each ranks it in its own scale — never an averaged tier. This doesn’t exist in the API yet.

Why

Two authors’ Tier 1 aren’t the same thing. One guide’s Tier 1 might be the top 5% of seeds; another’s might be the top 40%. Averaging “Tier 1” and “Tier 2” into a single number would imply a shared scale that doesn’t exist. As of 2026-09-25, 60 of the 290 items that have any guide have more than one, so side-by-side is the normal case, not an edge case — see GET /v1/items/{def}/{paint}/seeds/{seed} and its bulk twin, GET /v1/items/{def}/{paint}/patterns, in the API reference.

Topics group, they don’t merge

A topic is our word for what a system ranks, because authors name the same property differently (“Blue Gem”, “Playside Blue”). It sits on the system, not the guide: a guide with both a Blue Gem system and a Gold Gem system appears under both filters, showing only the matching system each time. topic groups matching systems together in a response; it never combines their levels or seeds.

The vocabulary itself isn’t published yet — topic is present on every system today and is null until then.