Editorial Policy
Last updated: 2026-05-25
This page explains exactly how an article gets onto Gacha Codex — what we use for sources, how we draft and check claims, what gets published versus rejected, and how we handle mistakes.
Sourcing
Every factual claim in a Gacha Codex article should be traceable to one or more of the following, in descending order of preference:
- Primary sources. Official patch notes, developer livestream transcripts, in-game tooltips and documentation published by the game's developer or publisher.
- Established community trackers. Long-running community resources with their own QA: HoYoLab, Prydwen, Mobalytics, Game8, Genshin Impact Wiki (Fandom), the Honkai: Star Rail wiki, and similar.
- Active community consensus. Subreddits, Discord communities and content-creator analyses, used to corroborate the above — not as a sole source for a numeric claim.
Sources used for an article are linked at the bottom of that article. When a single number (a damage multiplier, an ascension cost, a banner end date) is the load-bearing piece of a claim, it is checked against at least one primary source before publication.
How drafts are produced
We use large-language-model tooling — specifically Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude — to draft prose from structured research data. This is the same kind of assistance most professional newsrooms now use, and we disclose it openly. Google's own guidance on AI content is that the method doesn't matter — quality, usefulness and honesty about provenance do.
Concretely, an article goes through these stages:
- Outline. A structured outline is generated from the topic + sources, listing every claim the article will make and the data backing each one.
- Draft. The outline is expanded into prose, with inline citations to the source URLs.
- QA pass. The draft is scored across six dimensions — see below.
- Publishing gate. Score and per-dimension thresholds determine whether the article publishes, publishes with an editorial banner, is held back for revision, or is rejected outright.
The quality rubric (qa_score)
Every draft is scored from 0 to 10 across six 0–2 dimensions (max raw 12, rescaled to a 10-point qa_score):
- Search-intent match. Does the article actually answer what a reader searching this query is looking for?
- Information density. Is the content load per paragraph high, or is it padding to hit a word count?
- Structure. Are headings, tables and lists organized so a reader can navigate to their specific question?
- AI-pattern hygiene. Are there hallmarks of unedited LLM output — empty hedging ("it's important to note"), generic platitudes, repeated phrasings? Lower is better; we penalize these heavily.
- SEO hygiene. Title tag, headings, internal links and schema match the topic without keyword-stuffing.
- Factual accuracy. Every numeric claim and proper noun (character names, weapon names, banner dates) is traceable to a source. This is a hard gate — see below.
Publishing thresholds
| qa_score | Tier | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| ≥ 7.5 | Clean | Published, indexable in search, no banner. |
| 6.0 – 7.5 | Note | Published with an editorial note flagging the weaker dimension. |
| 4.5 – 6.0 | Strong revise | Held back for revision. Does not publish. |
| < 4.5 | Reject | Rejected. Does not publish. |
A draft with any unsourced or unverifiable named entity (e.g. a character or item not present in the source data) fails the factual-accuracy gate regardless of total score.
Updates and refreshes
Live-service games change weekly. We track patch notes for every game we cover; an in-scope patch triggers a re-check of the affected tier-list entries, character builds and banner pages. Older articles are timestamped, and the editorial team's stale-content detector flags pages older than a threshold for manual review.
Corrections
If you spot a factual error, use the contact form. We process correction requests within 7 days. When a meaningful factual error is corrected, the article gets a "Last updated" date bump and a brief note describing what changed.
Conflicts of interest
- Gacha Codex is independent. We are not paid by any game developer or publisher, and we accept no review codes, early access or exclusive previews.
- We do display Google AdSense advertising and use a small number of Amazon Associates affiliate links. Both are disclosed: see the Privacy Policy and the Affiliate Disclosure.
- Affiliate links never influence tier placements, build recommendations or which games we cover.
What we won't publish
- Leaks, datamined kits, unannounced characters or banners.
- Account-buying, RMT, exploit and bot-tool content.
- Content copied or paraphrased from another site without independent rewriting and source attribution.
- "Reviews" written from a press kit without independent verification of the claims.