Elden Ring figured out the anti-piracy SEO game | Hacker News Reader

Elden Ring figured out the anti-piracy SEO game

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For those who don't understand, "Torrent" is the name of an important character in the game.

It's the name of the players horse.

I'm guessing that the poster avoided clarifying that because it's a spoiler.

I went into this game blind (while being a from soft games fan) and I was gladly surprised by this feature since it's something new in their games.

That's pretty funny. Even though normal people would just open their favorite tracker instead of doing that search.

Didn't even think of it because I had it preordered for the PS5. And with steam sales i don't really pirate pc games any more either.

I thought trackers are used to find peers? How do you find a torrent using trackers?

Most trackers have an associated website, the term "tracker" is often used to refer to both the actual torrent tracker and the listing site together.

Yep, the site.

Unrelated topic: what is to be done about these terrible "wiki" sites that dominate search results about games?

why terrible? those wikis are super helpful

infested with huge video ads and are terrible on mobile. slow and bloated even with ublock.

Most game wikis are so awful on mobile I just don't bother. Its infuriating.

It didn't have to be this way! Wikipedia used to host all of this information before they switched from a policy of inclusionism to deletionism [1]. Now, it's all been relegated to for-profit hellholes like Fandom/Wikia. I dream of the day that someone stands up a new nonprofit, forks Wikipedia, and takes it back to the good old days.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism

The autoplay videos are often videos of their affiliated streamers on Twitch as well, which artificially increases the "viewers" count of said Twitch streams (thousands of viewers just browsing their wikis). You'll notice fextralife streamers near the top of Twitch by a significant margin on some of the latest trendy games (New World and more recently Lost Ark).

I wound up blocking all those with uBlock Origin personally.

If it's about the fextralife wiki and its horribel twitch inclusion on every page, ublock can suppress those divs and the last line rewrites the css rule to be full-screen (if that helps)

To add to your filters:

eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com##.simulation-hero-heading.section-heading-light.section-heading.ad-sidebar

eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com##.sidebar-top-border

eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com###sidebar-wrapper

eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com###wrapper:style(padding-left: 0px !important)

probably better to block the source if possible rather than to use a cosmetic filter

live.primis.tech$domain=fextralife.com

Also, I had to disable Firefox's Enhanced tracking protection in order for the video to show in the first place (ads too). The addon 'I don't care about cookies' seems to remove the ads after ETP has been disabled too.

I only learned about this wiki couple of days ago. Obv looking for the elden wiki. Not really a fan of fextra, as someone else confirmed here about their shady wiki origins which I didn't even know about.

One possibility is to move the wiki to different hosting that doesn't stuff ads everywhere. It can be done, and I've seen it done successfully. Fandom actually lets you export the full data for the wiki, migrating the community is harder than migrating the data.

I mean if people were willing to pay for content they might not need to throw ads every which way?

Nothing. It is for now the best way to display information about games that involve lore, character customization, etc,.

What alternative do you propose? A blog styled as a Wiki? Ultimately, it's the same thing.

The wikis for the souls games are extremely useful and accurate - I've used them when I got stuck and it made the game even more fun!

Are you actually talking about those wiki sites or different ones?

I assume it's about the wikis that are just ad-filled copies of other wikis.

No, they're not. Fextralife especially is filled with information that's often wrong or misleading.

My complaints on Fexelea could fill a book. She started that site with help, including the building of said site, from people on PSN. She then stole from reddit rampantly, but forswore ads so people didn't complain much. But she monetized her youtube channel and would only post videos (often 4+ hours with no timestamps- which was also against her own site's rules), when people complained she began allowing 'approved uploaders' (read- kicking her down her percentage). Wasn't long before ads were all over the place. Around the time Bloodborne was released she gamed SEO with names of pages with lorem ipsum and the oage itself would read 'coming soon', or 'be the first to add to this page' while other site already had the information.

Recently she began begging for funding with banners a la Wikipedia.

That site can suck a big one.

I didn't know about all that backstory, thanks for sharing that. Another reason to not use it.

Fun fact, Jimmy Wales (Co-founder of Wikipedia) also is the co-founder of Fandom which is a for profit company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)

And it turns my computer into a nice little space heater.

Sadly probably nothing it's just the natural cycle of things.

fextralife became popular as the go to wiki for soul-type game by copy pasting data from the original wikis and using aggressive marketing oriented tricks to get put above on google while using various autoplay to get views on twitch. Now they are here to stay and look like they made lot on effort on Elden including a nice map.

But now the cycle continue, extremely efficient scrapper are copying their data and putting them on oddly similar website, all saying the exact same thing. The most impressive whoever made these also make it auto translate into many localized websites. And the most annoying is if any of the original pages have mistakes then in a less than a week the web is covered with this false data.

Fextralife is great, they are a crowdsourced guide site that’s immaculately arranged and styled. There’s none of the sluggish javascript bullshit that newer game wiki sites have, just fast loading text with the occasional image. A few ads but no constant barrage of autoplay videos in the corners and pop ups.

The thing to be done about Fextralife is “wonder if I should give them money after once again using them to make my trip through a mysterious game easier”.

IGN’s sluggish, messy wikis, on the other hand...

IGN displays the cookie popup on every page load so they're useless.

I preferred wikidot for soulsborne games but they don't seem to have elden ring. Most other sites give you a few "how to become overpowered" guides and maybe locations of a few items. So sadly fextralife it is.

Their formatting is cluttered, sure, but they can be quite useful.

It's fine as it is, a game wiki is often the go-to resource for tips and tricks for that specific game.

If you are really annoyed, you can always add -wiki to the search query.

I have to believe it's an incident of convenient language overlap

This as an anti piracy measure falls apart when you recall pirates will already have/know a tracker (or other means) not susceptible to this due to limited scope

Or said another way: this only really works against first timers

Looks like this will encourage newcomer pirates to "git gud".

Or just to use hyphens.

`torrent elden ring -horse -steed`

Very few people know about negative keywords.

That's git gud at search :D

Sounds like first timers would be the most likely to say "Ok, I'll buy it then"

More so than the seasoned ones for sure, but they'd actually find more success omitting any game details so I question how many.

You shouldn't look at anti-piracy measures as all-or-nothing. Skilled pirates don't pay. They are a lost cause. Most anti-piracy is just making sure the average person--who could probably figure out torrents, but hasn't done so--isn't able to easily pirate.

The tracker wack-a-mole game works against old semi-reformed pirates like--um, my fiend--who was able to figure out usenet piracy and private trackers back in college. But would rather plunk down 60 bucks than spend time sucking up to children for invites.

That said, its either a coincidence or a joke/homage. Hard to believe its a purposeful tactic.

True, I apologize for making it seem as such - as an unintended side effect I could see it meeting this goal.

Totally agree that those predisposed to piracy are going to do it.

Money is an interesting thing to mention. Those invites don't necessarily need to be begged for/networked - they can also be purchased.

Out of curiosity, what the semi-reputable trackers that take cash? I know usenet indexers do it.

The piracy community is an interesting place.

I haven't heard of any directly taking payments [for membership, at least], but rather third parties selling invites.

It's another somewhat shady area of the internet, adjacent (and somewhat overlapping) with the piracy ones.

I guess, though:

  torrent elden ring -steed -horse

Seems to work fine.

Why is that tweet is just a screenshot of another tweet?

It's showing an in-game mountable horse that is called "Torrent", which when searched upon, is also what someone who wants to torrent the game in the context of piracy.

Because the person tweeting it doesn't want to invest in creating content, and doesn't want to give traffic to the original poster.

I hate that shit so I tracked down the original (live) tweet and responded to him with it.

> Why quote tweet a screenshot of a tweet instead of the live tweet? https://twitter.com/envinyon/status/1499446300428881925

Found the live tweet, I never give tweet thieves vanity metrics.

https://twitter.com/envinyon/status/1499446300428881925

There was band in the 90s named "Live" that managed the same thing, entirely unintentionally I assume. On the downside, they're probably also pretty hard to find through legitimate searches.

Not sure how Torrent fits in, but nonetheless good example of a hard to find topic.

You can add Band to the query and find them easily, so not a big problem.

On a slightly related note, their album Throwing Copper is definitely worth listening to.

Clever (if on purpose) but circumvented by appending “download”.

Actually, it would have been far more clever to make people download the Torrent steed as a DLC or something like that.

I see you haven't come across "Download The Crestfallen" boss yet?

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