Editorial Process

A randomizer is a promise. When you tap the button, you are trusting that the pool of heroes it draws from actually matches the game you are about to load into. This page explains how we keep that promise — how the roster and the guides on Rivals Randomizer are researched, updated and reviewed, and where the lines are between sources, editing and automated help.

Where the information comes from

Facts on this site come from a written source register that lists which sources we trust and why. The primary source is the developer: the official Marvel Rivals site at marvelrivals.com, including its patch notes, balance posts and news. The workhorse for roster detail, roles, ability numbers and event history is the Marvel Rivals Wiki on Fandom, which keeps an edit history and marks its own gaps. Established gaming press with named authors is used only to corroborate those two. The register also keeps a list of things that do not exist in Marvel Rivals (for example, an in-game prize wheel, which belongs to a different game called Roblox Rivals), so they are never described as real. We do not publish statistics nobody measures in public, such as win, pick or ban rates. Where the sources disagree or are silent, a page says so instead of guessing.

How the roster stays current

The single most important rule of this project is timing: when a new hero goes live in Marvel Rivals, adding them to the randomizer comes first. An automated check runs twice a day. It compares the site's roster with the Marvel Rivals Wiki's hero list, latest season and event pages, and reads the official news and patch-notes lists, then opens an alert for every new hero, season, patch or official post. It never edits the site by itself: a person confirms each change against the official site or the wiki before the roster or a page is updated. New seasons, added characters and role changes all trigger a roster review, and when the hero count or season label changes we search every page for the old number. If there is ever a short gap while we verify a change, we treat closing it as a priority, not a backlog item.

Human review by the editor

Every guide and reference page on the site is edited by Sukie Gao, the founder and editor of Rivals Randomizer, before it publishes. She follows the patch cadence and reads each page the way a player would — checking that a Vanguard is actually filed as a Vanguard, that a comp recommendation is not two seasons out of date, and that the wording is clear rather than padded. Nothing goes live purely because a draft exists; it goes live because the fact-check and the content gate below have passed and the editor has signed off on it. When we get something wrong, we fix it and, where it matters, note that the page was updated.

Our use of AI, disclosed

We believe in being upfront about tools. Articles are researched and drafted with AI assistance and edited by Sukie Gao before publication. In practice that means an AI tool gathers information from the sources above and writes a first draft that copies every number, name and date from a source. Then a separate fact-check pass, run by an AI agent that did not write the page, re-reads every claim against the official site and the wiki, corrects what is wrong, deletes what cannot be verified, and records on the page how many claims it checked and which sources it read. We do not include invented first-person play stories. Finally, every guide page must pass a content gate script (scripts/check-content.mjs) that checks length, titles and descriptions, internal links, that citations point only to registered sources, that hero counts and season labels match the roster, that nothing on the does-not-exist list or an unpublished statistic slipped in, and that a current fact-check record is present. The roster data in particular is confirmed against the official site and the wiki, because that is the part you are trusting most.

How we handle tier and difficulty ratings

Some of our data is objective — a hero's name, their role, whether they are in the game yet. Other data is a judgement call, and we treat it differently. Difficulty labels come from the Marvel Rivals Wiki's 1–5 difficulty rating for each hero: 1–2 is shown as Easy, 3 as Medium and 4–5 as Hard. Deadpool has no wiki rating, so his label is our own. Tier bands and short playstyle notes are this site's editorial view of the current balance patches, not a measured statistic, and they shift as patches land. We deliberately avoid inventing precise-looking "power scores" that imply more certainty than the game actually supports — a fabricated number is worse than an honest "this is roughly A-tier right now." If the meta moves, those ratings are expected to move with it.

How often pages are reviewed

Beyond roster updates, we revisit the meta-sensitive pages — the patch notes page, the tier list, best comps, counters and the seasonal explainers — when a patch or balance post changes how the game plays, and when a season changes we check the evergreen references for counts, examples and wording that no longer hold up. Pages that describe timeless mechanics change less often than pages about the current meta, and that is by design: we update when the game gives us a reason to, not on an arbitrary clock, so a "last updated" date on our pages reflects a real edit to that page rather than a timestamp bumped on every build.

Corrections and our accuracy commitment

We would genuinely rather hear that we made a mistake than let it sit. If you spot a hero that is missing, mis-roled, or out of date, a roster error report is one of the most useful messages we can get, and we treat it as a priority fix rather than general feedback. You can send one through our contact page. Our commitment is simple: keep the pool matched to the live game, review pages when the game changes, and be honest about how the content is made. If you want to know more about who is behind it, see the about page and the author page, or head back to the homepage to try the tool.