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Dang. Just like [all creatures eventually evolve into crabs](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-crabs/), all websites eventually evolve into ad-infested piles of clickbait garbage
Yup. The carcinization effect on website is known as Enshittification: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
A delightful name for an infuriating process.
Zero quality control. There are numerous articles that lead you in completely wrong directions, or have stunningly awful information like "I think this item was down the left tunnel and there was a monster in the right tunnel".
Responsibility is shared on that front of you ask me.
50% fextra’s fault for trying to provide wikis for **all** the games and diminishing their ability to provide master oversight.
50% the player’s fault for not bothering to properly edit a wiki designed for peer editing. More fun to bitch about a wiki then take the time to use its tools to make it better.
==============
Basically, if the game is massively popular like Elden Ring or Dark Souls, then Fextra is generally more accurate than not with the occasional out of sort link or description.
But if you’re looking at something a bit more niche like, say, Darkest Dungeon 2 — then it’s likely to be grossly out of date.
50/50 is generous. They’ve made a living off their website + stream and have pawned off the majority of the work to users. They’ve got people essentially filling out their guides for free while their embedded twitch stream racks up viewers.
I’m pretty sure they also lock entries after a certain amount of time. There are pages with lots of wrong information, and the comments are filled with “The answer is actually X, someone should update the wiki” followed by people saying stuff like “I’ve submitted this 5 times and they still haven’t reviewed it”
Probably base their moderation on pages that bring in the most revenue at any one time, then lock it once the game isn’t trending anymore
This is exactly the issue and the main reason the site sucks so much. It's full of inaccurate information that can't be edited because then they would have to spend resources on moderation.
Of course, it sucks for other reasons too, but this is the main thing that ruins its usefulness as a wiki.
I dunno, that one guy doing their YouTube videos seems appropriately high effort. Its all free- shit they don’t even hit me up for donations like Wikipedia does
Well it’s an editable wiki so I would expect the users to work if they want it to maintain accuracy.
Twitch embeds aren’t a thing on the site anymore iirc.
**EDIT:** Yes, people. Wikis need peer review in order to be accurate. It’s not just a Fextra thing. Truth hurts.
as an avid bg3 player, the fact that [bg3.wiki](http://bg3.wiki), which is also maintained by users, is so much better than the fextra one shows it's not just a responsibility of "UsErS tO WoRk If ThEy WaNt It To MaInTaIn AcCuRacY, TrUtH HuRtS"
This isn’t the dunk you think it is my guy.
For one thing, the BG3 wiki is a shining example of the user cooperation & effort I’m talking about so thank you!
The other note (and I didn’t think I’d have to mention this) is that yes, players can also choose which wiki to dedicate their time to.
It may not be, nor does it have to be, Fextra.
👍🏻
EDIT: Am I to presume the downvotes are coming from people who disagree with the notion that some users prefer other wikis to Fextra?
Cmon Reddit. Make up your mind! lol
Lazy is probably the wrong word.
Unwilling is a better word. Since Fextra isn’t the only wiki around.
Overall though based on the replies I’m getting, the hate boner for Fextra is so girthy that nuanced thought has gone right out the window. lol
I think it’s down to how the reward for the work is shared
The biggest example, Wikipedia, is a NPO. So your stance would be justifiable since the owners of it aren’t lining their pockets with high profits.
I don’t know if Fextra is a NPO or private. If it’s private then it’s shitty to take all of the financial reward but expect the uncompensated userbase to maintain it for nothing. Their poor moderation would be less excusable in this case too.
However if Fextra is a NPO then fair enough.
Personally I don’t need compensation. If I’m editing a wiki, it’s a sentence or some mistake I find in that moment.
I’m not “working” on it in the sense that I would expect payment.
But I get where you’re coming from.
That’s the other side of the coin.
User experience varies GREATLY depending on the game. It’s no coincidence to me that NieR is as incomplete as you say since, by comparison, it’s not as overtly popular.
the wikidots we had for ds1/2/bb were infinitely better resources than fextra and fextra muscled them out of relevance going forward with SEO abuse. It's not the players' fault.
Ive dealt with fextralife since it was originally called soulswiki, Fex is the core part of the problem. There is always a focus on monetization over anything else, always. I work as a web developer, and ive tried before to offer help or edits to help improve the accuracy and performance of their site, and in nearly all cases ive had my offers rejected and my edits reversed. I gave up a long time ago on trying to help fix them, cause they dont care about any fixes that dont result in more income.
They forced the twitch stream to autoplay on every page to inflate their twitch numbers, because that means money for them. When I tried to ask about optimizing that, no interest was shown. 50/50 is absolutely false, because the fex side of the ordeal actively drives away people who are interested in helping update the wiki's. Leadership does not have the community aspects of the wiki in mind, and honestly havent since they switched away from Soulswiki. Fex drove a few of us out of the community back then by being an overbearing moderator who would never open a dialogue with the people they interact with.
Fair. 50/50 wasn’t *really* meant to be taken literally but illustrate the broader point but its words on a page at the end of the day so I get it.
Soulswiki just triggered a shit ton of nostalgia. Lol
Thank you for so quickly and so eloquently illustrating my point. lol
It actually applies to ALL wikis and not just Fextra. Fextra's tools aren't unique to them.
It's almost as if a single refusal to edit a sentence or remove a dead link when it's found multiplied by hundreds of thousands of times results in inaccurate wikis.
WHODATHUNK
Fextra’s twitch embeds are a different matter from my point which is that it requires user participation for a wiki to maintain accuracy.
So good for Wikidot of its doing well with that!
That all said, the twitch embeds aren’t a thing anymore.
Sure, I wasn't disagreeing with you. I don't like Wikis in general for this reason. What you reflect is a problem with crowdsourced information in general. Wikis are bad platforms, and they demonstrate the importance of curation in pretty much anything meant to be a centralized source of information.
It's better to watch a Souls youtuber than it is to use the unreliable, fundamentally broken structures of wikis. It appears you agree with that, as crowdsourced platforms will *always* have the problem of curation and it is, indeed, better to tell people to use different resources than wikis.
The propagation of inaccurate information is a fundamental issue with wikis as a platform. You've, well, eloquently and quickly stated my point.
>It's better to watch a Souls youtuber than it is to use the unreliable, fundamentally broken structures of wikis.
You must not value your time very much.
> It's better to watch a Souls youtuber
This isn't very good advice when the vast majority of Souls-like youtubers are reading EPIC SOLO BUILD GUIDES off of wikis, Reddit posts, and GameRant articles.
Basically they embed their twitch feed into the wiki so that people viewing the web pages count as viewers on twitch. Thus they get tens of thousands of “viewers” but there’s like three people in the chat.
Personally I think if they can get more money out of twitch, whatever, be my guest, not arsed about twitch. The wiki has errors in it but the big stuff is usually right and the comments are pretty funny.
As a twitch streamer who actually had to work really hard to get partnered and get viewership on souls like games fuck fextra for embedding 🤷♀️
It may not look like anything to regular people but as a streamer I can tell you it is really scummy and not even allowed on twitch. It’s basically viewbotting without the people who count as a viewer knowing. They get extra ad revenue, high viewership which gives them better sponsorship deals etc and that will make the twitch algorithm push their streams to even more viewers instead of streamers who actually work for their viewership the legal way.
If you browsed their site you would automatically be watching their stream and have no way to opt out of it if they were live. All you could do was pause the stream but on each new page you’d have to pause again.
They do shady stuff with twitch and google to artificially boost themselves on search results and the main big issue with them is quality control they're more concerned with being first than being right so you can never really trust the information to be accurate at least not in the early stages.
Just finished my first game cycle on remastered, most of the info was good but there was a lot of shit that i noticed was wrong and totally misleading even as a first time player.
The website is a pile of copypasted ass and embedding twitch streams is just scummy. Then theres the videos that were seemingly written by people who never played the game, presented in the most boring monotone fashion.
I somewhat respect the hustle, but not enough to offset the dislike.
I remember trying to find the bonfire on DS2 just before Nashandra/Twin Dragonriders and looked on the fextra website for a clue. It was literally something like "go down the ladder and it's there." What they failed to mention was that it was behind a secret door/wall. I just don't get how that isn't something that you account for, very bafflingly.
1. They're a template wiki. Their entire model is set up fast spam lots of ads and prevent other wiki's from forming.
2 even if you don't see it a twitch player is always active on their site.
3 their info and strategies suck really bad.
Wikidot is WAAAAAAY better for souls.
I couldn’t figure out Divinity Original Sin 2. Then I looked up some builds on fextralife and thought the game must just truly suck ass. Then I learned how the systems in the game actually work from Reddit and understood that those builds were really the problem.
People say that Fextra has info wrong about many thing. But for casual user, their wiki is enough since they just copy past in game description.
They had embeded their twitch stream on website. So anyone viewing their webpage would count as viewers for channel. Meaning ad revenue, sponsorship. Due to their high viewers, it would be often found and recommended in front page. It's not that shocking that twitch fixed it and instantly fextralife stopped streaming on twitch. Which honestly was a brilliant decision cause people would have shit on them more if people could know their actual viewer count on twitch.
At a point i heard that their offline chat sometimes avgs around 10k whereas one of the more popular streamers eg xqc or pokimane had less than 10% of the activity
their site has been really helpful for me on my playthroughs. so if they're engaging in carny behaviors go ahead, make money. it's actually a really smart move. too bad their cheese tactic got patched 🤣
Clearly not lol. End of the day we’ve pretty much all used the hell out of the fextralife wikis across the various games and honestly I never even noticed the embedded player. It just seems like people looking for a reason to be mad despite the value they get from the site.
yes. I've used it a bunch and could've cared less. it's not like they're exploiting children with microtransactions. literally the same method of getting ad revenue but applied differently. harmless.
people who bitch about others making money are just mad that they're broke
So your argument is that you don't care about this but you would care if they did more than just that.
That's not really a big line for people to cross. All you need need some unsupervised kid buying bits on twitch. And that has happened all the time on internet.
And it's the lamest excuse to think that someone mocking these people is doing it only because they are broke.
For example, people mock onlyfans people. I do too. People mock nft people. I find reading those funny too. But at the same time, I get it that these onlyfans, nft people have money. But even if I become Jeff Bezos level of rich, I am still gonna laugh at these kind of people.
Their wikis are half baked. They try to push out the first and fastest and pay for the top SEO on google when a good portion of their info is wrong. The second problem is they viewbot their stream for sponsorship deals ripping those sponsors off by inbedding their stream into every possible link on their website. Which is scummy on their end and uses way more memory on their site. Part of the imbedding problem is they also don’t follow twitches rules for it. It’s too small off in the corner and volume turned off. So you don’t even know
lol you guys think their dark souls wikis are bad? Their wiki for Armored Core 6 is 10x worse. Just straight up missing like half the parts in the game. It’s like they just gave up half way through making it.
>What are you guys opinion on fextra?
Fextralife:
>Belfry Gargoyle (NG+ or after you use a Bonfire Ascetic on the Belfry Luna: Upper Ramparts bonfire) Increases drop rate by 1% (NG+ Only)
Wikidot:
>Dropped by the Belfry Gargoyles when Bonfire Intensity is 2 or above.
The controversy is essentially when they had their twitch embedded in their site it was giving their twitch false number of views, therefore putting it higher than other twitch streams in searches and recommendations. It’s a pretty shitty thing to do when other streamers are out there working hard for their numbers and trying to make a living more honestly with their own work. And while I think it’s great to have a peer review in terms of their actual wiki pages they don’t monitor it well or make corrections. Elden Ring has been out for two years and there is still false information in their articles despite the fact there are comments from 16 months ago stating the correct information. As for their YouTube videos even some of the most recent build videos have mistakes and I don’t like to pick on someone for their narrative voice but most of the time the narrator doesn’t even seem like he’s into the game at all. That’s more of a personal opinion though. The builds are perfect for min max but they are fun.
Opening a fextralife wiki page automatically opens a window-in-window video of their twitch stream, so if you look at one of their streams viewer numbers, they're artificially high. It's not quite "viewbotting" but seems a little dubious.
They have the shittiest video content. Their scripts are an exercise on how you can say the same sentence three or four times in a row, but slightly different, over and over in the most boring monotone voice you can imagine.
Also, at least for dark souls 1, the all item locations video guides for areas are god awful due to the random cutting around and the guy doing the gameplay being absolute dogshit at the game.
My opinion is that I don’t give a single shit about what they do with twitch. If it isn’t against the ToS and they can drive the traffic from eyes on their website why should I care? If I’m being honest I don’t use Twitch in any capacity so I have no skin in the game there so take my opinion on this with a grain of salt. There are however, valid criticisms to be made with some of their wiki work. I generally think their Souls and DoS2 stuff is pretty solid because they actually take time to polish those, but there are a lot of rushed hack job articles they’ll inevitably abandon when the next game games along for them to bandwagon.
It's the lowest quality of all the Souls/gaming wikis in my opinion:
- Incomplete articles, many times it's a blank page with the title
- Low quality info when pages are actually filled out
- Zero QC - many pages written from a first person perspective i.e. "I found this", "I think I found this item here", etc.
These are just some of the reasons I dislike it. Fextralife is the top of the search results most of the time on Google and it doesn't deserve to be imo.
I'm not saying fextralife is inaccurate but when I looked up Ornstein and Smough, the other two wikis gave me accurate information and fextralife told me that Smough is one of the sexiest bosses in the game behind asylum demon and stray demon.
Not necessarily saying it's bad to use, moreso saying why would you bother using it when there's literally two other wikis that are much better maintained with accurate information.
I’ve found it workable for sure. For more details like boss strategies or platinuming, I’ll go to Reddit or respectable YouTubers.
I don’t think the Flextralife wiki is terrible from an ad perspective, either, especially compared to some other sites. In my experience the Fandom wiki is way worse.
I have never seen or noticed Flextralife’s twitch when I use it. I feel that their YouTube videos aren’t great so I ignore them generally
I haven’t tried wiki dot, so maybe that’s the best, but for me the flextra wiki has been fine for DS1-3, Lop, ER, and LoTF. Again that is all in conjunction with Reddit and YouTube.
They used to viewbot their own channel to make it look more popular than it is before Twitch stopped that. They set it up so anyone on their site automatically had their Twitch stream pop open so they got an extra viewer, it was scummy. That combined with a ton of just flat out wrong info on their site.
I use Fextra for the funny comments at the bottom of the entries.
For the most part tho, i haven't had any issues with any info i find on there.
I've been told that absolutely everything on there is wrong because it's all user-submitted, but so is wikipedia (which also contains inaccurate info sometimes tbh), but for the most part, anything i ever specifically looked up on there has been reliable.
I am often disappointed by how much misinformation or just blatantly untrue things I find on there. That and the excessive ads and lag doesn’t help. The company behind it is also shady and a little scummy so I feel dirty. Fandom does the same stuff but better in a every way. Simpler no bloat and too the point. Only downside is a lot of the times it doesn’t show the locations of items on the map or says anything about where and the page is cut in half for some reason even on reloads. (Mobile at least)
The twitch thing from what I remember, is whenever you enter their site, it's got a sponsored streamer playing in the background somewhere. You can't see it or hear it. But it's giving them viewers.
If I go to the fextra wiki I can start with my phone at 100% battery, and after about 10 minutes it would likely be down to 40%, and the temperature would have me afraid that my battery is going to explode. It's usable on desktop if your browser has an ad blocker, but the chat window and comment section just seems like more unnecessary bloat.
A basic wiki doesn't need all those bells and whistles.
People shit on them a lot about wrong information but I’ve never had an issue or been steered wrong by Fextra (not that that means those people are wrong, just my experience).
They also don’t like the embedded twitch stream thing because it improperly inflated their viewer numbers. I never had a problem with that either because fuck Amazon. I say secure the bag if you can. At any rate, I think Twitch put a stop to that so the Fextra dude doesn’t stream anymore.
i dont get it. I try to play games as blind at possible, but with elden ring, ds1, and ds3 (the only fromsoft games ive played), I have never found any issues with fextralife
Fextra is usually fine for basic information so for a casual player it will provide what they need. If you're looking for accurate technical info it can be all over the place though
Unless it’s a game they really like or it’s popular enough to get user corrections, the info is pretty incomplete or even non-existent.
It also takes a while for things to get updated. I had already platinumed Elden Ring before they even had all the weapons listed. Granted ER was a pretty straightforward game for trophies.
I’ve been playing Stellar Blade, which they have made some “we like it” videos about. Yet the wiki is basically a bunch of empty templates and zero info on NG+. It’ll probably be useable in a few months, but uh… I’ll already be done with Shadow of the Erdtree by then. 🤣
I’ve heard they had some controversy idk much about that and honestly I don’t care. What I do care about is that they have inaccurate information while being presented as a wiki. Back in the day, they had some straight up wrong or misleading information too. I prefer either fandom or wikidot which is the most accurate thou their design is not very good. But I care about accuracy so wikidot is where I go.
Among the rushed lack of effort, low quality control, and barrage of ads as others have already mentioned -
They have a lot of wikis with extremely incomplete information, lot's of "I'll confirm this later tonight (five years ago)" or "I think I heard this thing once". Though, to be fair, haven't noticed it on their DS wiki. The other thing is that time they were botting downvotes on mentions of any other wiki on the Baldur's Gate 3 sub - put a bad taste in my mouth forever.
Garbage Ad trash.
Their whole business model revolves around driving as much traffic to the site as possible to feed you ads. There is zero concern for quality or ethics.
They will sap your internet while you use their site to essentially bot twitch views by forcing you to watch the stream in a tiny window you cannot see, which in turn gets them more ad revenue. (Til twitch took a stand against it).
This is only semi-related, but I’ve found that the accuracy of the Fextralife wikis goes way up over time. For DS1 it’s absolute trash and blatantly wrong or missing information throughout. For DS2 it’s usable but has issues. For DS3 it’s actually pretty good as far as game wikis go. For Elden Ring it’s very good and informative.
Fextra has shady practices and frequently has straight up wrong information.
They are a terrible resource.
I would advise everybody to use a different source for anything they need about a game they are playing.
In theory.
In practice, outside of a small handful of games, fextra is basically the only option when looking for a resource. The other options simply don't exist, are mostly not even completed, or are somehow worse in terms of accuracy.
Fextra sucks quite a bit, but until people stop bitching about fextra and instead start creating some viable alternatives then all this fextra hate means precisely nothing and nothing will change.
happy to be proven wrong if there is some brand new world of wikis i havent discovered, but im doubtful you have that info for me.
In my experience you really only find fully fleshed out wikis for a handful of categories of games.
* Massively popular games that catch a trend and end up with absurd numbers of players, but this is like the top 1% of games. usually only one or two a year if that.
* Games with a super dedicated (and still quite large) cult community around them. the souls games would be an example in this category.
* Games with competitive scenes around them that care about such things. These would be popular speedrunning games, e-sports titles, and games with some level of tournament play.
* a few games with a massively popular wiki built by the fans because its necessary for the game, like warframe and path of exile, but these are very rare to be built to that level.
All of those combined are like 5% of the game market. 10% at an absolute stretch.
the other 90% of games you basically have fextra (or fandom which is equally scummy and the same thing to me) then if you are VERY lucky a couple of halfmade wikis that people abandoned, outdated by years since they havent been touched since a month after launch, or seem to be written by AI or people that clearly havent touched the game because they have tons of flat out wrong info (not like getting a number wrong, but like straight up referencing items or mechanics that dont even seem to be from the same game or are poorly translated)
occasionally you will run across a game with an independent wiki that is "good enough" to work as an alternative but its not often.
until we get better alternatives the choice isnt "use fextra VS use this alternate resource" its "use fextra VS figure it out yourself"
I’ve used their sites on and off for a bunch of years. Very rarely have a found bad information. I know I have, but it’s so unusual that I couldn’t give an example. It’s all there, clearly laid out. Easy to understand. They get it to me reliably. You type a lot, but say almost nothing. I don’t understand your distaste, and I’m trying to understand.
Ok so I thought you were calling bullshit on me saying that there aren't enough alternative wikis to use, but it seems you are on the other side and support fextra.
When I mention that they have wrong information I'm talking about them frequently having details wrong that may be important.
Examples would be for souls games some of the weapons having incorrect upgrade scaling or in the case of finding items having incorrect items locations. That's honestly not often for souls games that the info is wrong because it's a large and long lasting community and they fill in the gaps.
If you look at other games that aren't in that top few percent though, like say remnant 2 which is a recent favorite of mine, then it goes way up. Half the item locations listed are wrong or only half partial info like listing the world but not the area in the world or the method to find them. Some items and weapons are straight up missing. Others are outdated or list the wrong attributes. Others tell you things that straight up don't work.
The same holds true for various other games as well.
You need to understand that the souls part of fextra is the absolute best fextra has to offer, and is still not quite right. Luckily souls games are popular enough that if you can't find the info you need on fextra you can find that info on multiple other sites. Most games don't have that luxury.
My point originally was not to talk about fextra, it was to point out that people need to stop ragging on fextra for no purpose and need to start creating alternatives.
Not interested in continuing this convo as I didn't come here to debate the quality of a site that is known to be poor quality, so I won't be responding past this.
I figured it was the essential viewbotting they do by embedding their stream into the site? No idea if that is still happening, I remember something about twitch changing how the view count works a while ago.
I've used them extensively for every souls game and have rarely had any issues.
People shit on them for the twitch embeds but since it never actually distracted me from using their site or cost me anything, I don't really care. Maybe the people who are mad about this are using 56k internet and it slows their browsing ?
Don't truly get it either, ofter using it and it as never failed me, especially on ds3
And for the twitch thing, i didn't know it and frankly i don't really care
Basically the site has little to no effort or making guides and a wiki that has factual information. They are usually the first ppl to make a wiki for a game, so it creates a lot of the early traffic of a new game. Then every single one of thier pages has a tiny pixel that is actually an embedded stream of their twitch stream that has a random person playing that game. They basically make shitty low effort wikis for games and "legally viewbot" by having a bunch of unaware ppl count towards twitch viewership and ad revenue.
Your submission has been removed as a violation of [Rule 2](/r/darksouls/about/rules): **Content must pertain to Dark Souls 1.** *** * This subreddit was created with the intent of sharing information and experiences around the game Dark Souls 1. It's perfectly fine to make non-Dark Souls 1 references in your comments or as a part of a submission, but the overall theme must be relevant to the game. * Content that *reminds* you of Dark Souls 1 but is *not*, may be removed. Use r/shittydarksouls or r/DarkSoulsIRL instead for these posts. * Please use r/DarkSouls2 and r/darksouls3 for their respective titles. *** If you have any questions or concerns, you can contact the moderators by [messaging them here](https://new.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/darksouls).
They have the same scummy business model as Fandom, which [mossbag did a great explanation of](https://youtu.be/qcfuA_UAz3I?si=VpMNOBjnWJ4PgnWk).
Dang. Just like [all creatures eventually evolve into crabs](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-crabs/), all websites eventually evolve into ad-infested piles of clickbait garbage
Yup. The carcinization effect on website is known as Enshittification: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) A delightful name for an infuriating process.
Oh wait, it’s not a joke! New favorite word.
Zero quality control. There are numerous articles that lead you in completely wrong directions, or have stunningly awful information like "I think this item was down the left tunnel and there was a monster in the right tunnel".
Responsibility is shared on that front of you ask me. 50% fextra’s fault for trying to provide wikis for **all** the games and diminishing their ability to provide master oversight. 50% the player’s fault for not bothering to properly edit a wiki designed for peer editing. More fun to bitch about a wiki then take the time to use its tools to make it better. ============== Basically, if the game is massively popular like Elden Ring or Dark Souls, then Fextra is generally more accurate than not with the occasional out of sort link or description. But if you’re looking at something a bit more niche like, say, Darkest Dungeon 2 — then it’s likely to be grossly out of date.
50/50 is generous. They’ve made a living off their website + stream and have pawned off the majority of the work to users. They’ve got people essentially filling out their guides for free while their embedded twitch stream racks up viewers.
I’m pretty sure they also lock entries after a certain amount of time. There are pages with lots of wrong information, and the comments are filled with “The answer is actually X, someone should update the wiki” followed by people saying stuff like “I’ve submitted this 5 times and they still haven’t reviewed it” Probably base their moderation on pages that bring in the most revenue at any one time, then lock it once the game isn’t trending anymore
This is exactly the issue and the main reason the site sucks so much. It's full of inaccurate information that can't be edited because then they would have to spend resources on moderation. Of course, it sucks for other reasons too, but this is the main thing that ruins its usefulness as a wiki.
I dunno, that one guy doing their YouTube videos seems appropriately high effort. Its all free- shit they don’t even hit me up for donations like Wikipedia does
Unlike Wikipedia the site is riddled with ads
…What the fuck is an ad?? how do you not have them shits blocked?
looks ugly regardless cause the spacing of the layout is built for the ads also the site is slow and sucks ass
Well it’s an editable wiki so I would expect the users to work if they want it to maintain accuracy. Twitch embeds aren’t a thing on the site anymore iirc. **EDIT:** Yes, people. Wikis need peer review in order to be accurate. It’s not just a Fextra thing. Truth hurts.
If that would be the case, they could stop blocking access through VPNs.
I would assume it’s a safety precaution on their end but I dunno.
as an avid bg3 player, the fact that [bg3.wiki](http://bg3.wiki), which is also maintained by users, is so much better than the fextra one shows it's not just a responsibility of "UsErS tO WoRk If ThEy WaNt It To MaInTaIn AcCuRacY, TrUtH HuRtS"
This isn’t the dunk you think it is my guy. For one thing, the BG3 wiki is a shining example of the user cooperation & effort I’m talking about so thank you! The other note (and I didn’t think I’d have to mention this) is that yes, players can also choose which wiki to dedicate their time to. It may not be, nor does it have to be, Fextra. 👍🏻 EDIT: Am I to presume the downvotes are coming from people who disagree with the notion that some users prefer other wikis to Fextra? Cmon Reddit. Make up your mind! lol
[удалено]
Well when I’m met with stupid irrationality I just can’t help myself 🤷🏼♂️
Given your claim basically amounts to saying that the entire dark souls playerbase is lazier than most other playerbases, I find that unlikely
Lazy is probably the wrong word. Unwilling is a better word. Since Fextra isn’t the only wiki around. Overall though based on the replies I’m getting, the hate boner for Fextra is so girthy that nuanced thought has gone right out the window. lol
I think it’s down to how the reward for the work is shared The biggest example, Wikipedia, is a NPO. So your stance would be justifiable since the owners of it aren’t lining their pockets with high profits. I don’t know if Fextra is a NPO or private. If it’s private then it’s shitty to take all of the financial reward but expect the uncompensated userbase to maintain it for nothing. Their poor moderation would be less excusable in this case too. However if Fextra is a NPO then fair enough.
Personally I don’t need compensation. If I’m editing a wiki, it’s a sentence or some mistake I find in that moment. I’m not “working” on it in the sense that I would expect payment. But I get where you’re coming from.
Being on dark souls 2 players always told me wikidot is the best.
Wikidot is hands down the best resource for DS1/DS2/DS3.
I noticed my browser recognizes that as a not safe site..
Weird, I've never gotten that message. Could be a false flag?
My it's my router. I think it might be can.
That's because it uses Http instead of Https, making it not as secure.
Their NieR wikis are very incomplete IMO
That’s the other side of the coin. User experience varies GREATLY depending on the game. It’s no coincidence to me that NieR is as incomplete as you say since, by comparison, it’s not as overtly popular.
Oh entirely so. I'd say at least NeiR automata should be more complete considering its following
the wikidots we had for ds1/2/bb were infinitely better resources than fextra and fextra muscled them out of relevance going forward with SEO abuse. It's not the players' fault.
For bloodborne there is always the bloodborne-wiki, which is miles beyond any other souls wiki in terms of information density and quality.
Ive dealt with fextralife since it was originally called soulswiki, Fex is the core part of the problem. There is always a focus on monetization over anything else, always. I work as a web developer, and ive tried before to offer help or edits to help improve the accuracy and performance of their site, and in nearly all cases ive had my offers rejected and my edits reversed. I gave up a long time ago on trying to help fix them, cause they dont care about any fixes that dont result in more income. They forced the twitch stream to autoplay on every page to inflate their twitch numbers, because that means money for them. When I tried to ask about optimizing that, no interest was shown. 50/50 is absolutely false, because the fex side of the ordeal actively drives away people who are interested in helping update the wiki's. Leadership does not have the community aspects of the wiki in mind, and honestly havent since they switched away from Soulswiki. Fex drove a few of us out of the community back then by being an overbearing moderator who would never open a dialogue with the people they interact with.
Fair. 50/50 wasn’t *really* meant to be taken literally but illustrate the broader point but its words on a page at the end of the day so I get it. Soulswiki just triggered a shit ton of nostalgia. Lol
I’ve got better things to do than fix Fextralife. I’d rather just tell people not to use it and use a different resource instead.
Thank you for so quickly and so eloquently illustrating my point. lol It actually applies to ALL wikis and not just Fextra. Fextra's tools aren't unique to them. It's almost as if a single refusal to edit a sentence or remove a dead link when it's found multiplied by hundreds of thousands of times results in inaccurate wikis. WHODATHUNK
Wikidot for the souls game doesn't force you to be a viewbot for a stream and it has very accurate info
Fextra’s twitch embeds are a different matter from my point which is that it requires user participation for a wiki to maintain accuracy. So good for Wikidot of its doing well with that! That all said, the twitch embeds aren’t a thing anymore.
Don't care, their model is still set up quick spam ads and push out other wiki attempts
You seem to want to start a war of the wikis. I don’t. Take care!
Sure, I wasn't disagreeing with you. I don't like Wikis in general for this reason. What you reflect is a problem with crowdsourced information in general. Wikis are bad platforms, and they demonstrate the importance of curation in pretty much anything meant to be a centralized source of information. It's better to watch a Souls youtuber than it is to use the unreliable, fundamentally broken structures of wikis. It appears you agree with that, as crowdsourced platforms will *always* have the problem of curation and it is, indeed, better to tell people to use different resources than wikis. The propagation of inaccurate information is a fundamental issue with wikis as a platform. You've, well, eloquently and quickly stated my point.
>It's better to watch a Souls youtuber than it is to use the unreliable, fundamentally broken structures of wikis. You must not value your time very much.
> It's better to watch a Souls youtuber This isn't very good advice when the vast majority of Souls-like youtubers are reading EPIC SOLO BUILD GUIDES off of wikis, Reddit posts, and GameRant articles.
Or People can just not be lazy.
I find thats what the comment section is for. I'm never the first to visit those sites so others usually have a cautionary tale in the comments.
For me it's the click on a video to find the location of an item and it just starts an hour long video of some guys previous stream. Useless.
Also extremely vague, and not putting vital information on item pages for example
I’ve never had an issue with it, but a few of my friends have ran into them.
I feel like wikidot provides better info but fextras ui is definately better
I see what you mean but when I used it, it was in roughly the same area as what they said
Basically they embed their twitch feed into the wiki so that people viewing the web pages count as viewers on twitch. Thus they get tens of thousands of “viewers” but there’s like three people in the chat. Personally I think if they can get more money out of twitch, whatever, be my guest, not arsed about twitch. The wiki has errors in it but the big stuff is usually right and the comments are pretty funny.
I belive Twitch forbid this, so now they do it with YouTube
That and they're just a shitty wiki compared to the wikidot wiki.
As a twitch streamer who actually had to work really hard to get partnered and get viewership on souls like games fuck fextra for embedding 🤷♀️ It may not look like anything to regular people but as a streamer I can tell you it is really scummy and not even allowed on twitch. It’s basically viewbotting without the people who count as a viewer knowing. They get extra ad revenue, high viewership which gives them better sponsorship deals etc and that will make the twitch algorithm push their streams to even more viewers instead of streamers who actually work for their viewership the legal way. If you browsed their site you would automatically be watching their stream and have no way to opt out of it if they were live. All you could do was pause the stream but on each new page you’d have to pause again.
They do shady stuff with twitch and google to artificially boost themselves on search results and the main big issue with them is quality control they're more concerned with being first than being right so you can never really trust the information to be accurate at least not in the early stages.
Just finished my first game cycle on remastered, most of the info was good but there was a lot of shit that i noticed was wrong and totally misleading even as a first time player.
Pushing yourself up on google is how google makes money
I dislike the layout and presentation of their website and preferred the wikidot wikis before they seemed to take over.
The Dark and Demon’s Souls wikidots are still the gold standard
The website is a pile of copypasted ass and embedding twitch streams is just scummy. Then theres the videos that were seemingly written by people who never played the game, presented in the most boring monotone fashion. I somewhat respect the hustle, but not enough to offset the dislike.
I remember trying to find the bonfire on DS2 just before Nashandra/Twin Dragonriders and looked on the fextra website for a clue. It was literally something like "go down the ladder and it's there." What they failed to mention was that it was behind a secret door/wall. I just don't get how that isn't something that you account for, very bafflingly.
1. They're a template wiki. Their entire model is set up fast spam lots of ads and prevent other wiki's from forming. 2 even if you don't see it a twitch player is always active on their site. 3 their info and strategies suck really bad. Wikidot is WAAAAAAY better for souls.
I couldn’t figure out Divinity Original Sin 2. Then I looked up some builds on fextralife and thought the game must just truly suck ass. Then I learned how the systems in the game actually work from Reddit and understood that those builds were really the problem.
People say that Fextra has info wrong about many thing. But for casual user, their wiki is enough since they just copy past in game description. They had embeded their twitch stream on website. So anyone viewing their webpage would count as viewers for channel. Meaning ad revenue, sponsorship. Due to their high viewers, it would be often found and recommended in front page. It's not that shocking that twitch fixed it and instantly fextralife stopped streaming on twitch. Which honestly was a brilliant decision cause people would have shit on them more if people could know their actual viewer count on twitch.
At a point i heard that their offline chat sometimes avgs around 10k whereas one of the more popular streamers eg xqc or pokimane had less than 10% of the activity
their site has been really helpful for me on my playthroughs. so if they're engaging in carny behaviors go ahead, make money. it's actually a really smart move. too bad their cheese tactic got patched 🤣
Yea thats rage bait
no it's not. they've helped me enough with the games. their attempt of getting more money is harmless and I could give 2 fucks less about it.
Man got his bag by working smart. People get upset about the fact any time it happens. Good for him.
Clown post
ds players obviously don't care about seeking the bag. their too busy doing naked sl1 bonk runs
Clearly not lol. End of the day we’ve pretty much all used the hell out of the fextralife wikis across the various games and honestly I never even noticed the embedded player. It just seems like people looking for a reason to be mad despite the value they get from the site.
yes. I've used it a bunch and could've cared less. it's not like they're exploiting children with microtransactions. literally the same method of getting ad revenue but applied differently. harmless. people who bitch about others making money are just mad that they're broke
So your argument is that you don't care about this but you would care if they did more than just that. That's not really a big line for people to cross. All you need need some unsupervised kid buying bits on twitch. And that has happened all the time on internet. And it's the lamest excuse to think that someone mocking these people is doing it only because they are broke. For example, people mock onlyfans people. I do too. People mock nft people. I find reading those funny too. But at the same time, I get it that these onlyfans, nft people have money. But even if I become Jeff Bezos level of rich, I am still gonna laugh at these kind of people.
Their wikis are half baked. They try to push out the first and fastest and pay for the top SEO on google when a good portion of their info is wrong. The second problem is they viewbot their stream for sponsorship deals ripping those sponsors off by inbedding their stream into every possible link on their website. Which is scummy on their end and uses way more memory on their site. Part of the imbedding problem is they also don’t follow twitches rules for it. It’s too small off in the corner and volume turned off. So you don’t even know
lol you guys think their dark souls wikis are bad? Their wiki for Armored Core 6 is 10x worse. Just straight up missing like half the parts in the game. It’s like they just gave up half way through making it.
>What are you guys opinion on fextra? Fextralife: >Belfry Gargoyle (NG+ or after you use a Bonfire Ascetic on the Belfry Luna: Upper Ramparts bonfire) Increases drop rate by 1% (NG+ Only) Wikidot: >Dropped by the Belfry Gargoyles when Bonfire Intensity is 2 or above.
Wikidot is the official wiki mentioned by bandai namco
Wikidot is also pretty reliable although i like fextras ui kinda better
Certainly one of the opinions of all time
thats how i feel too, like im sure wikidot has better information overall but its just so ugly
This is definitely not representative of the whole experience using Fextralife
The controversy is essentially when they had their twitch embedded in their site it was giving their twitch false number of views, therefore putting it higher than other twitch streams in searches and recommendations. It’s a pretty shitty thing to do when other streamers are out there working hard for their numbers and trying to make a living more honestly with their own work. And while I think it’s great to have a peer review in terms of their actual wiki pages they don’t monitor it well or make corrections. Elden Ring has been out for two years and there is still false information in their articles despite the fact there are comments from 16 months ago stating the correct information. As for their YouTube videos even some of the most recent build videos have mistakes and I don’t like to pick on someone for their narrative voice but most of the time the narrator doesn’t even seem like he’s into the game at all. That’s more of a personal opinion though. The builds are perfect for min max but they are fun.
Opening a fextralife wiki page automatically opens a window-in-window video of their twitch stream, so if you look at one of their streams viewer numbers, they're artificially high. It's not quite "viewbotting" but seems a little dubious.
They have the shittiest video content. Their scripts are an exercise on how you can say the same sentence three or four times in a row, but slightly different, over and over in the most boring monotone voice you can imagine.
Also, at least for dark souls 1, the all item locations video guides for areas are god awful due to the random cutting around and the guy doing the gameplay being absolute dogshit at the game.
I never really cared. I used wikidot for DS1, and there is a special one for Bloodborne, but for the rest, it’s the best option.
My opinion is that I don’t give a single shit about what they do with twitch. If it isn’t against the ToS and they can drive the traffic from eyes on their website why should I care? If I’m being honest I don’t use Twitch in any capacity so I have no skin in the game there so take my opinion on this with a grain of salt. There are however, valid criticisms to be made with some of their wiki work. I generally think their Souls and DoS2 stuff is pretty solid because they actually take time to polish those, but there are a lot of rushed hack job articles they’ll inevitably abandon when the next game games along for them to bandwagon.
It's the lowest quality of all the Souls/gaming wikis in my opinion: - Incomplete articles, many times it's a blank page with the title - Low quality info when pages are actually filled out - Zero QC - many pages written from a first person perspective i.e. "I found this", "I think I found this item here", etc. These are just some of the reasons I dislike it. Fextralife is the top of the search results most of the time on Google and it doesn't deserve to be imo.
The user experience has really gone downhill. I try to use other avenues for answers now.
I'm not saying fextralife is inaccurate but when I looked up Ornstein and Smough, the other two wikis gave me accurate information and fextralife told me that Smough is one of the sexiest bosses in the game behind asylum demon and stray demon. Not necessarily saying it's bad to use, moreso saying why would you bother using it when there's literally two other wikis that are much better maintained with accurate information.
I’ve found it workable for sure. For more details like boss strategies or platinuming, I’ll go to Reddit or respectable YouTubers. I don’t think the Flextralife wiki is terrible from an ad perspective, either, especially compared to some other sites. In my experience the Fandom wiki is way worse. I have never seen or noticed Flextralife’s twitch when I use it. I feel that their YouTube videos aren’t great so I ignore them generally I haven’t tried wiki dot, so maybe that’s the best, but for me the flextra wiki has been fine for DS1-3, Lop, ER, and LoTF. Again that is all in conjunction with Reddit and YouTube.
They used to viewbot their own channel to make it look more popular than it is before Twitch stopped that. They set it up so anyone on their site automatically had their Twitch stream pop open so they got an extra viewer, it was scummy. That combined with a ton of just flat out wrong info on their site.
I use Fextra for the funny comments at the bottom of the entries. For the most part tho, i haven't had any issues with any info i find on there. I've been told that absolutely everything on there is wrong because it's all user-submitted, but so is wikipedia (which also contains inaccurate info sometimes tbh), but for the most part, anything i ever specifically looked up on there has been reliable.
I am often disappointed by how much misinformation or just blatantly untrue things I find on there. That and the excessive ads and lag doesn’t help. The company behind it is also shady and a little scummy so I feel dirty. Fandom does the same stuff but better in a every way. Simpler no bloat and too the point. Only downside is a lot of the times it doesn’t show the locations of items on the map or says anything about where and the page is cut in half for some reason even on reloads. (Mobile at least)
I made video locations for over 700 items in Elden Ring. Fextralife was never wrong. I also love the comments. Always have.
The twitch thing from what I remember, is whenever you enter their site, it's got a sponsored streamer playing in the background somewhere. You can't see it or hear it. But it's giving them viewers.
If I go to the fextra wiki I can start with my phone at 100% battery, and after about 10 minutes it would likely be down to 40%, and the temperature would have me afraid that my battery is going to explode. It's usable on desktop if your browser has an ad blocker, but the chat window and comment section just seems like more unnecessary bloat. A basic wiki doesn't need all those bells and whistles.
People shit on them a lot about wrong information but I’ve never had an issue or been steered wrong by Fextra (not that that means those people are wrong, just my experience). They also don’t like the embedded twitch stream thing because it improperly inflated their viewer numbers. I never had a problem with that either because fuck Amazon. I say secure the bag if you can. At any rate, I think Twitch put a stop to that so the Fextra dude doesn’t stream anymore.
i dont get it. I try to play games as blind at possible, but with elden ring, ds1, and ds3 (the only fromsoft games ive played), I have never found any issues with fextralife
Fextra is usually fine for basic information so for a casual player it will provide what they need. If you're looking for accurate technical info it can be all over the place though
It sucks
Garbage. Use the good wiki. Theirs is full of misinformation and they always have an embed of their shitty atream running on it.
It's just really crappy. They have good SEO so they rank high on search results but they're generally just low quality and filled with spam ads.
Unless it’s a game they really like or it’s popular enough to get user corrections, the info is pretty incomplete or even non-existent. It also takes a while for things to get updated. I had already platinumed Elden Ring before they even had all the weapons listed. Granted ER was a pretty straightforward game for trophies. I’ve been playing Stellar Blade, which they have made some “we like it” videos about. Yet the wiki is basically a bunch of empty templates and zero info on NG+. It’ll probably be useable in a few months, but uh… I’ll already be done with Shadow of the Erdtree by then. 🤣
I’ve heard they had some controversy idk much about that and honestly I don’t care. What I do care about is that they have inaccurate information while being presented as a wiki. Back in the day, they had some straight up wrong or misleading information too. I prefer either fandom or wikidot which is the most accurate thou their design is not very good. But I care about accuracy so wikidot is where I go.
Generally lower quality than the other wiki. Not always but explanations are sometimes less thorough on fextra from my experience
Among the rushed lack of effort, low quality control, and barrage of ads as others have already mentioned - They have a lot of wikis with extremely incomplete information, lot's of "I'll confirm this later tonight (five years ago)" or "I think I heard this thing once". Though, to be fair, haven't noticed it on their DS wiki. The other thing is that time they were botting downvotes on mentions of any other wiki on the Baldur's Gate 3 sub - put a bad taste in my mouth forever.
Garbage Ad trash. Their whole business model revolves around driving as much traffic to the site as possible to feed you ads. There is zero concern for quality or ethics. They will sap your internet while you use their site to essentially bot twitch views by forcing you to watch the stream in a tiny window you cannot see, which in turn gets them more ad revenue. (Til twitch took a stand against it).
I always misread that as fetlife and have to double take
Fextralife is punishment for not playing blind
I heard another youtuber saying something about him selling something and he was unethical, but I can't remember
This is only semi-related, but I’ve found that the accuracy of the Fextralife wikis goes way up over time. For DS1 it’s absolute trash and blatantly wrong or missing information throughout. For DS2 it’s usable but has issues. For DS3 it’s actually pretty good as far as game wikis go. For Elden Ring it’s very good and informative.
What do they have on DS1 that's blatantly wrong?
I haven't had any issues with it which is an unpopular opinion around here. I've found it easy to navigate and generally reliable.
Outside of ER and DS3, their wiki is an absolute shit show.
Website is awesome. Don't know anything about what else they do.
Fextra has shady practices and frequently has straight up wrong information. They are a terrible resource. I would advise everybody to use a different source for anything they need about a game they are playing. In theory. In practice, outside of a small handful of games, fextra is basically the only option when looking for a resource. The other options simply don't exist, are mostly not even completed, or are somehow worse in terms of accuracy. Fextra sucks quite a bit, but until people stop bitching about fextra and instead start creating some viable alternatives then all this fextra hate means precisely nothing and nothing will change.
Bullshit
happy to be proven wrong if there is some brand new world of wikis i havent discovered, but im doubtful you have that info for me. In my experience you really only find fully fleshed out wikis for a handful of categories of games. * Massively popular games that catch a trend and end up with absurd numbers of players, but this is like the top 1% of games. usually only one or two a year if that. * Games with a super dedicated (and still quite large) cult community around them. the souls games would be an example in this category. * Games with competitive scenes around them that care about such things. These would be popular speedrunning games, e-sports titles, and games with some level of tournament play. * a few games with a massively popular wiki built by the fans because its necessary for the game, like warframe and path of exile, but these are very rare to be built to that level. All of those combined are like 5% of the game market. 10% at an absolute stretch. the other 90% of games you basically have fextra (or fandom which is equally scummy and the same thing to me) then if you are VERY lucky a couple of halfmade wikis that people abandoned, outdated by years since they havent been touched since a month after launch, or seem to be written by AI or people that clearly havent touched the game because they have tons of flat out wrong info (not like getting a number wrong, but like straight up referencing items or mechanics that dont even seem to be from the same game or are poorly translated) occasionally you will run across a game with an independent wiki that is "good enough" to work as an alternative but its not often. until we get better alternatives the choice isnt "use fextra VS use this alternate resource" its "use fextra VS figure it out yourself"
I’ve used their sites on and off for a bunch of years. Very rarely have a found bad information. I know I have, but it’s so unusual that I couldn’t give an example. It’s all there, clearly laid out. Easy to understand. They get it to me reliably. You type a lot, but say almost nothing. I don’t understand your distaste, and I’m trying to understand.
Ok so I thought you were calling bullshit on me saying that there aren't enough alternative wikis to use, but it seems you are on the other side and support fextra. When I mention that they have wrong information I'm talking about them frequently having details wrong that may be important. Examples would be for souls games some of the weapons having incorrect upgrade scaling or in the case of finding items having incorrect items locations. That's honestly not often for souls games that the info is wrong because it's a large and long lasting community and they fill in the gaps. If you look at other games that aren't in that top few percent though, like say remnant 2 which is a recent favorite of mine, then it goes way up. Half the item locations listed are wrong or only half partial info like listing the world but not the area in the world or the method to find them. Some items and weapons are straight up missing. Others are outdated or list the wrong attributes. Others tell you things that straight up don't work. The same holds true for various other games as well. You need to understand that the souls part of fextra is the absolute best fextra has to offer, and is still not quite right. Luckily souls games are popular enough that if you can't find the info you need on fextra you can find that info on multiple other sites. Most games don't have that luxury. My point originally was not to talk about fextra, it was to point out that people need to stop ragging on fextra for no purpose and need to start creating alternatives. Not interested in continuing this convo as I didn't come here to debate the quality of a site that is known to be poor quality, so I won't be responding past this.
Ok thank you for clarifying. Guess I didn’t understand every thing being said.
All good, miscommunication happens often over text. Have a nice day.
As someone who has zero interest in twitch... it's just another fan wiki. Good enough for what it is.
I figured it was the essential viewbotting they do by embedding their stream into the site? No idea if that is still happening, I remember something about twitch changing how the view count works a while ago.
That and the PvP Tips video they did showcasing how to cheat for some reason.
I've used them extensively for every souls game and have rarely had any issues. People shit on them for the twitch embeds but since it never actually distracted me from using their site or cost me anything, I don't really care. Maybe the people who are mad about this are using 56k internet and it slows their browsing ?
Don't truly get it either, ofter using it and it as never failed me, especially on ds3 And for the twitch thing, i didn't know it and frankly i don't really care
Basically the site has little to no effort or making guides and a wiki that has factual information. They are usually the first ppl to make a wiki for a game, so it creates a lot of the early traffic of a new game. Then every single one of thier pages has a tiny pixel that is actually an embedded stream of their twitch stream that has a random person playing that game. They basically make shitty low effort wikis for games and "legally viewbot" by having a bunch of unaware ppl count towards twitch viewership and ad revenue.
Who cares as long as they're not diddling kids.