General Gaming News and Discussion
- Thread starter Wintermute
- Start date
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
CaughtCross
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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- 5,706
TBT-TheBigToe
Gemcutter
- 10,190
- 30,065
We should make an “Autism 24:7” shirt/hoodie/mug in that style. Not sure what to put on the back, the Austin 3:16 shirt had a skull on the back so maybe we can put a retard on it or something.
- 2
- 2
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MightyMadman
Lord Nagafen Raider
- 463
- 348
DUDE, THAT SHIT LOOKS CRAZY
let me slow down I have a love hate relationship with some fantasy games, some game like the Witcher grabbed my attention (I really want to play baldur's gate 3) and some game just look lame to me but when an east country make a fantasy game I lose my shit, Dragon Quest, Dragon's Dogma, Elden Ring, Dark Souls, FF16; they add a level of cool and charm to the game. But when you show me a game that's a less janky dragon dogma, a more action heavy Witcher, deep down if it ever released it's hard for me to not get hyped about this game.
- 1
Intrinsic
Person of Whiteness
- 15,026
- 13,123
Amazing, such a nostalgia hit. Just last year I was playing this soundtrack remembering back to this release. So many F-you puzzles in this though. Haha
- 1
AladainAF
Best Rabbit
- 12,914
- 31,017
Awesome. Only game I can remember that had bigger fuck you puzzles was Ripper, but I have very fond memories of this game.
- 2
Ambiturner
Ssraeszha Raider
- 16,043
- 19,530
I had never heard of this channel until like a week or two ago and don't fully understand the controversy, but fuck that guy.
He comes off as such a tool and I really want to punch him in his shitty face
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Hateyou
Not Great, Not Terrible
- 16,630
- 43,265
Linus is so last week. WE GOT SOME NEW DRAMA BOYS.
We don't normally get involved with drama as the whole purpose of those posts is to create responses like this one and farm people for outrage content. However, given the horrible and absurd nature of the accusations, we want to set the record straight with our community.
I made Fextralife because I wanted people to be able to play these games regardless of their busy lives, growing families, or lack of experience or understanding of mechanics. I love gaming, and I love RPGs, so I try my best to help make them as accessible as possible so that people don't give up on them for whatever reason.
A few days ago, we were made aware that a moderator of the small subreddit "BG3Builds", who also writes content for a small baldur's gate wiki site that is marketing itself as a Fextra alternative, announced via sticky that he would be banning our domain because he "suspected" there was a bot campaign manipulating posts. He allegedly conducted a test, that supposedly showed him that if he posted something bad about Fextralife, he would get downvoted. He also claims that he suspected there was also downvoting on links to his preferred domain. This test was allegedly conducted by him only and has no external validation and he has admitted there's no proof that we'd at all be involved - anyone could have downvoted him.
So, based on nothing but his own bias and with zero evidence of our involvement, he decided to publicly say he "leaned toward it being bots manipulating" and tell his community he wanted to ban links to us and if anyone tried to post a link, he would post an auto-reply telling them "Fextra is blacklisted for vote manipulation", and linking to his wiki instead.
It's very hurtful to me to see the stuff that people assume or take at face value. It seems you can accuse anyone of things on reddit and get people riled up and assume it's the truth.
Here is the truth: We didn't do any of this.
There's literally zero evidence that we did any of this, and the moderator blaming us is heavily invested in the other website that since it was launched 2 years ago has constantly self-promoted on reddit while badmouthing us. Typical of negative campaigns, it's not "use me because I have good content", it's "Use me because THEY are evil, because... (make random accusation here)."
This is now being spread as fact by other content creators that are using these false allegations to try and paint us in a bad light because they perceive us as competition or a threat, or because they are simply drama merchants that benefit from outrage and witchhunts.
I did not ask anyone in my community to interact with any subreddit post. I def do not have any reddit bots or have used any reddit bots or even know how to use any reddit bots. I didn't know reddit bots were a thing! I had never even been to the BG3Builds subreddit before this was posted, and I have never made a negative post about their wiki. I don't actually use reddit and I may post every few months or years based on a situation, and the idea that reddit is good for SEO or traffic is coming from people that don't know how things work, otherwise the consistent sticky topics and promotion links from reddit moderators would control the entire internet. Reddit accounts for less than 1% of our traffic because people using reddit are not looking to get in-depth gaming guides off-site, or already decided they didn't want to use what google or youtube proposed.
Our main competitors are Fandom, IGN, Games 8, PC Gamer... these are really giant sites with hundreds of millions of USD budget and 500+ staff. In contrast Fextralife is Fex & Cas plus stream/content from Tyr, Yuria, volunteer contributors and video editors / admin tech support. Besides the fact of how disgustingly unethical that would be and how I would strongly condemn and denounce any such action done in our name, we simply do not have the capacity, money, time or need to engage in such a stupid activity.
TL;DR This is a really RIDICULOUS accusation, that is also UNFOUNDED, has NO EVIDENCE and could be done by anyone. The people who benefit the most from this are a very small website that is now being presented as the virtuous martyr of "evil Fextralife", and is being promoted exclusively without competition.
Other false accusations:
1. "Fextralife is a large faceless company!"
This is just silly and untrue. Those "everything about X creator" sites are so lame they have a picture of Rick instead of Cas. We're a very small team working our butts off to create content for the games we love. People don't understand content creators of a size must use companies and agents to process payments, handle copyright or legal, obtain health insurance or pay others. Fextralife is a tiny group and we're doing our best competing with really big corporations out there.
2. "Fextralife is viewbotting"
A "viewbot" is when you use artificial and non-existing browsers to inflate views on twitch and that does try to fool advertisers, because a. it plays and ad and b. nobody is watching.
Embedding is an advertisement of the stream to real people on real browsers on an external website. Like any integration, the objective is to get people to click and go to twitch. No advertisements are played on the embedded unit, generating zero revenue. Embeds are part of the intended code of Twitch and are an intentional feature that anyone can use (and many content creators besides us do!). These are real people that we have worked tirelessly to build up into our community.
What embedding does for me is make my website audience aware I'm a person, I'm streaming, and I can show them games that I think they'd be interested in.
What embedding does for twitch is give them free advertising for their platform, and ongoing conversions from our website > twitch. These new people were not on twitch otherwise, and will now probably be recommended someone else, and hopefully come back and become part of the twitch ecosystem. It's why twitch has this feature (similar to youtube embeds!)
Our embed is by no means a secret - it’s very visible (in fact, in the best possible spot in our website) and there's even a command for it on our channel, and part of the channel rules. The idea that it's "fraud" is also absurd. Our sponsors are aware of the embed, and it's a great deal for them to be able to promote their content on both twitch and to our site users at the same time, particularly in the prime location that the embed has on our website.
3. "Fextralife is AI content"
You cannot create a wiki with AI, and we would never create content with AI, because the whole point of doing this and being a content creator is to write and help people on these games we like. We've had our sites and wikis since before there was a half functioning AI, and the idea that an AI could produce this content is so absurd... everyone would have this website if so! You can tell the AI articles by seeing the bloated top results you get on google these days, and I guarantee you they look nothing like our pages.
4. "Fextralife is just lazy opportunistic content because the wikis aren't complete"
Our content is made from pre-release copies. We work non-stop for weeks to play games, record footage, come up with content and translate it to both text and video. Every time you come by a wiki and it has an image, I had to get that item, screenshot it, name the screenshot, then crop the image, upload it to the wiki, add it to the page, type out the stats by hand. Once a game launches, there's usually a good amount of information on the wiki alongside templates for expansion but, since the idea is to provide a community platform, the 100% fleshing out is done by the community. This happens over time and the depth of the wiki ends up directly related to the interest in the game by the community (or in some cases very dedicated superfans who put in a lot of work to record their findings).
It is not reasonable to expect me or our tiny team to 100% cover every single game we're interested in. No other content creator, or website, is held to this demand. The whole point of hosting the special software for a wiki is so that others can collaborate and fill in the spaces if they want.
5. "Fextralife is harming gaming"
Another outlandish claim. This is a specific Twitch or Reddit one often posted and quickly accompanied by "so check out my content here because I'm real and passionate about this and they are not" - The concept is that because we exist, others can't grow their own content. This is just silly. Having more places making content is a good thing for any game. People parse and process information differently, prefer different things. Having different websites, different voices, different layouts give more people the opportunity to find guides that can help them specifically. Trying to ban or limit who should be allowed to make guides, or blaming us for being successful at doing so, is not only authoritarian but actually harmful for the audience that needs help.
When other websites and creators attack us in this manner, it seems cynical and malicious, particularly when they know the things, they are saying are not true. "I can't prove this, but I will accuse you anyway and encourage people to harass you" is a disgusting approach. "I will willfully misrepresent embedding as botting so that my audience get confused and think you're a fraud" is also malicious.
I won't be posting about this again because I don't think there's a point as the people that thrive on this drama have built entire communities for this and get off on the stress that they cause others. But, for all of you who are here and confused about what has been going on and why there's been brigades against our channel - this is the reason and I hope you can ignore it and focus on gaming, which is what we are all here to do. And thank you to all of you who have reached out to express support, and to the many contributors and fans that have helped us along the way.
I made Fextralife because I wanted people to be able to play these games regardless of their busy lives, growing families, or lack of experience or understanding of mechanics. I love gaming, and I love RPGs, so I try my best to help make them as accessible as possible so that people don't give up on them for whatever reason.
A few days ago, we were made aware that a moderator of the small subreddit "BG3Builds", who also writes content for a small baldur's gate wiki site that is marketing itself as a Fextra alternative, announced via sticky that he would be banning our domain because he "suspected" there was a bot campaign manipulating posts. He allegedly conducted a test, that supposedly showed him that if he posted something bad about Fextralife, he would get downvoted. He also claims that he suspected there was also downvoting on links to his preferred domain. This test was allegedly conducted by him only and has no external validation and he has admitted there's no proof that we'd at all be involved - anyone could have downvoted him.
So, based on nothing but his own bias and with zero evidence of our involvement, he decided to publicly say he "leaned toward it being bots manipulating" and tell his community he wanted to ban links to us and if anyone tried to post a link, he would post an auto-reply telling them "Fextra is blacklisted for vote manipulation", and linking to his wiki instead.
It's very hurtful to me to see the stuff that people assume or take at face value. It seems you can accuse anyone of things on reddit and get people riled up and assume it's the truth.
Here is the truth: We didn't do any of this.
There's literally zero evidence that we did any of this, and the moderator blaming us is heavily invested in the other website that since it was launched 2 years ago has constantly self-promoted on reddit while badmouthing us. Typical of negative campaigns, it's not "use me because I have good content", it's "Use me because THEY are evil, because... (make random accusation here)."
This is now being spread as fact by other content creators that are using these false allegations to try and paint us in a bad light because they perceive us as competition or a threat, or because they are simply drama merchants that benefit from outrage and witchhunts.
I did not ask anyone in my community to interact with any subreddit post. I def do not have any reddit bots or have used any reddit bots or even know how to use any reddit bots. I didn't know reddit bots were a thing! I had never even been to the BG3Builds subreddit before this was posted, and I have never made a negative post about their wiki. I don't actually use reddit and I may post every few months or years based on a situation, and the idea that reddit is good for SEO or traffic is coming from people that don't know how things work, otherwise the consistent sticky topics and promotion links from reddit moderators would control the entire internet. Reddit accounts for less than 1% of our traffic because people using reddit are not looking to get in-depth gaming guides off-site, or already decided they didn't want to use what google or youtube proposed.
Our main competitors are Fandom, IGN, Games 8, PC Gamer... these are really giant sites with hundreds of millions of USD budget and 500+ staff. In contrast Fextralife is Fex & Cas plus stream/content from Tyr, Yuria, volunteer contributors and video editors / admin tech support. Besides the fact of how disgustingly unethical that would be and how I would strongly condemn and denounce any such action done in our name, we simply do not have the capacity, money, time or need to engage in such a stupid activity.
TL;DR This is a really RIDICULOUS accusation, that is also UNFOUNDED, has NO EVIDENCE and could be done by anyone. The people who benefit the most from this are a very small website that is now being presented as the virtuous martyr of "evil Fextralife", and is being promoted exclusively without competition.
Other false accusations:
1. "Fextralife is a large faceless company!"
This is just silly and untrue. Those "everything about X creator" sites are so lame they have a picture of Rick instead of Cas. We're a very small team working our butts off to create content for the games we love. People don't understand content creators of a size must use companies and agents to process payments, handle copyright or legal, obtain health insurance or pay others. Fextralife is a tiny group and we're doing our best competing with really big corporations out there.
2. "Fextralife is viewbotting"
A "viewbot" is when you use artificial and non-existing browsers to inflate views on twitch and that does try to fool advertisers, because a. it plays and ad and b. nobody is watching.
Embedding is an advertisement of the stream to real people on real browsers on an external website. Like any integration, the objective is to get people to click and go to twitch. No advertisements are played on the embedded unit, generating zero revenue. Embeds are part of the intended code of Twitch and are an intentional feature that anyone can use (and many content creators besides us do!). These are real people that we have worked tirelessly to build up into our community.
What embedding does for me is make my website audience aware I'm a person, I'm streaming, and I can show them games that I think they'd be interested in.
What embedding does for twitch is give them free advertising for their platform, and ongoing conversions from our website > twitch. These new people were not on twitch otherwise, and will now probably be recommended someone else, and hopefully come back and become part of the twitch ecosystem. It's why twitch has this feature (similar to youtube embeds!)
Our embed is by no means a secret - it’s very visible (in fact, in the best possible spot in our website) and there's even a command for it on our channel, and part of the channel rules. The idea that it's "fraud" is also absurd. Our sponsors are aware of the embed, and it's a great deal for them to be able to promote their content on both twitch and to our site users at the same time, particularly in the prime location that the embed has on our website.
3. "Fextralife is AI content"
You cannot create a wiki with AI, and we would never create content with AI, because the whole point of doing this and being a content creator is to write and help people on these games we like. We've had our sites and wikis since before there was a half functioning AI, and the idea that an AI could produce this content is so absurd... everyone would have this website if so! You can tell the AI articles by seeing the bloated top results you get on google these days, and I guarantee you they look nothing like our pages.
4. "Fextralife is just lazy opportunistic content because the wikis aren't complete"
Our content is made from pre-release copies. We work non-stop for weeks to play games, record footage, come up with content and translate it to both text and video. Every time you come by a wiki and it has an image, I had to get that item, screenshot it, name the screenshot, then crop the image, upload it to the wiki, add it to the page, type out the stats by hand. Once a game launches, there's usually a good amount of information on the wiki alongside templates for expansion but, since the idea is to provide a community platform, the 100% fleshing out is done by the community. This happens over time and the depth of the wiki ends up directly related to the interest in the game by the community (or in some cases very dedicated superfans who put in a lot of work to record their findings).
It is not reasonable to expect me or our tiny team to 100% cover every single game we're interested in. No other content creator, or website, is held to this demand. The whole point of hosting the special software for a wiki is so that others can collaborate and fill in the spaces if they want.
5. "Fextralife is harming gaming"
Another outlandish claim. This is a specific Twitch or Reddit one often posted and quickly accompanied by "so check out my content here because I'm real and passionate about this and they are not" - The concept is that because we exist, others can't grow their own content. This is just silly. Having more places making content is a good thing for any game. People parse and process information differently, prefer different things. Having different websites, different voices, different layouts give more people the opportunity to find guides that can help them specifically. Trying to ban or limit who should be allowed to make guides, or blaming us for being successful at doing so, is not only authoritarian but actually harmful for the audience that needs help.
When other websites and creators attack us in this manner, it seems cynical and malicious, particularly when they know the things, they are saying are not true. "I can't prove this, but I will accuse you anyway and encourage people to harass you" is a disgusting approach. "I will willfully misrepresent embedding as botting so that my audience get confused and think you're a fraud" is also malicious.
I won't be posting about this again because I don't think there's a point as the people that thrive on this drama have built entire communities for this and get off on the stress that they cause others. But, for all of you who are here and confused about what has been going on and why there's been brigades against our channel - this is the reason and I hope you can ignore it and focus on gaming, which is what we are all here to do. And thank you to all of you who have reached out to express support, and to the many contributors and fans that have helped us along the way.
Palum
what Suineg set it to
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He's got that saccharine history channel feel going where they tell you an obvious exaggeration about "how things were".
"And people went CRAZY over this new thing! They thought it was the DEVIL! Your ancestors were RETARDED!"
Meanwhile actual newspaper articles from that year: "local farmers question the high cost of new thing, concerned about availability of parts".
- 2
Burns
Avatar of War Slayer
- 7,438
- 14,652
I saw a post on the BG3 reddit about them last week, from one of the reddit mods (and we know how trustworthy those are). That they were suspected of using bots to do various things on reddit, like down voting anything negative posted about them and upvoting stuff directing to them.
I tried to find it, but no luck.
The other BG3 Wiki might be better, but I haven't needed to use either of them since seeing it: Baldur's Gate 3 Wiki
- 11,217
- 2,364
Fextralife is still a bunch of fucks. I hate the embeded twitch stream shit, it both is annoying when on the website and when checking streams on twitch because the Fextralife "stream" is always at the top due to all the views from ppl who just want to check the wiki. Double whammy of stupid shit. Their websites are also sometimes outdated/deceptive, being wikis that's somewhat normal but it's annoying because they kill off the competition early by eating all the google clicks from being so big, even when their wiki is shittier, eventually leading to them being the only wiki left over. They have good wikis for a few games, and terrible ones for a bunch more.
Not as bad as Fandom but pretty fucking bad. That said I don't know about botting reddit for promoting it, seems kinda pointless, maybe they do, maybe they don't, there's tons of downvoting bots on reddit constantly running for whatever reason.
Not as bad as Fandom but pretty fucking bad. That said I don't know about botting reddit for promoting it, seems kinda pointless, maybe they do, maybe they don't, there's tons of downvoting bots on reddit constantly running for whatever reason.
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Burns
Avatar of War Slayer
- 7,438
- 14,652
Never even knew they auto loaded Twitch until I read the Reddit post on them.
Load up some blockers for your browser. With Ublock Origin and NoScript here is what I see on the BG3 wiki (I still prefer the layout of the other wiki I linked above, though):
Vorph
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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Just block ###sidebar-wrapper in Ublock Origin and the whole column (it's all ad or self-promo stuff if anything does appear there) will be blank. Would've removed it entirely so the rest of the page was wider, but there's no element like that to nuke.
And yeah, the other BG3.wiki site is better. I still remember the days when it was just fextralife vs. wikidot for Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 wikis. Sadly, the far inferior site won.
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I have both but it shows, probably because I have permissions on both fextralife(to display some shit in the past) and twitch(to watch it). Anyway not a huge deal just don't like that shit, it's just garbage no one asked for it, I get it it's "not against the rules" but it's the equivalent of playing your music on speakers in a public place, it's not against the rules but you're still a dickhead. I'll check the wrapper block
Vorph
mentionned though.- 1
Burns
Avatar of War Slayer
- 7,438
- 14,652
Ah, yea. If you are on Twitch all the time, you would need to keep turning "twitchcdn.net" on/off in NoScript, in order to block the embed on other sites, and I could see how that would get annoying.I have both but it shows, probably because I have permissions on both fextralife(to display some shit in the past) and twitch(to watch it). Anyway not a huge deal just don't like that shit, it's just garbage no one asked for it, I get it it's "not against the rules" but it's the equivalent of playing your music on speakers in a public place, it's not against the rules but you're still a dickhead. I'll check the wrapper block
I also did what Vorph said and it cleans up the page a bit more too.
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