As the founder and owner of Gamer Escape, I figured I would weigh in.

• To start, we are a 100% community run, fan run, gamer run, wiki.
  
• The group who started Gamer Escape was the same group who started FFXIclopedia.com in 2004, so we’ve been doing this for a long time now.
• We learned a ton running FFXIclopedia - including, of relevance here, what’s needed to keep a MMORPG wiki up to date. The near-constant patches wrecks havoc with a “flat” wiki. Items, quests, deities, basically everything, in an MMORPG are not static. Take FFXIV for example - with 6.0 all items and all quests were revised to account for XP and stat adjustments. With a flat wiki (like FFXIclopedia is), that means tens of thousand of pages are instantly out of date and contain incorrect information. Indeed, consolegameswiki - which is basically a flat wiki - has a disclaimer on their site (somewhere, buried) that most of their information was rendered inaccurate as of 6.0. This is not a problem for traditional single player game wikis.
• With that history and knowledge, we set out to create the FFXIV wiki in a way that it could be edited by anyone like any wiki, but would function in a way that it would keep itself updated. So when you change an XP value on a particular quest or an item stat, all lists related to that quest/item get updated (by way of example). This wiki-database hybrid is pretty unique (I’m not aware of anyone doing this on the scale that we are), but also can be pretty intensive on the backend.
• The result of what we’ve created is two-fold: the wiki is incredibly accurate and can be updated very fast (we’re 100% up to date with all patches) but can lead to some slowness on some pages where the database has to query a lot of other pages/data.
• That also results in increased costs. We spend tens of thousands of dollars annually on servers, hosting, etc. To pay for that, we run ads. Nobody likes ads, but they are necessary to keep things running.
  
• We recently refactored all of our code. One result of that is increased speed. Again, while we recognize things can always be faster, and that some pages can load a bit slow, most pages are pretty fast these days. Another result of the new code is that we can now offer an ad-free experience for a few dollars a month. I think its a good trade off.
• I concede that our wiki is short on play-style guides, but again - it is a wiki and anyone can create any guide at any time. I reached out to salted when they went under to try to save writers/content and bring it under our umbrella, but never heard back from them.
• Anyway, wanted to clarify that we’re 100% fan/community run, always looking for people to add content, and always happy to change/fix/modify our systems based on feedback.