FFXI Discovery Process

This might be an odd request, but SE originally kept a lot of the details of the game secret (both upfront, like quests, missions, drops etc. and in the backend, like pDIF calculations, TH calculations, etc.).

Over time, a lot of these were discovered, and if you take a look at the Wikis it's safe to assume almost everything about the game is now understood.

I'd like to go back, though, and try to get an idea of how all of these different facets of the game were discovered. Some quests and missions have the oddest requirements before they can progress, or require you to talk to a completely unknown NPC on the far side of the world and given no hints. Did people really just wait until someone accidentally stumbled upon it?

How were the pDIF calculations figured out? They're incredibly specific. Was this information eventually provided by SE or did someone sit there and figure the calculations out themselves using trial and error?

Crafting HQ rates are a bit more straightforward, as I assume it's just repeating the process under different circumstances and recording it, but still... someone did this. Are they remembered for it?

I'm sure there's plenty more.

I have so many questions about the process of discovering the vast amount of secrets in FFXI and would love to hear from people who may know, whatever that discovery may be. And who discovered it.

datamining?

DMG equations, like pdif, were massive amounts of data collection math and statistics. Much of this exists on the bg forums

good ol fashion trial and error
till tools arose from the trial and error for some cases

and math a lot of math

This will blow your mind too - there used to not be crafting recipes available in the game.

In the beginning, SE didn't tell us ***and some people developed theories about how the game worked, some of which were quantitative. As time went on, SE gave occasional interviews in Japanese where then would tell us something about the game. Some of that information leaked over to the EN side and was discussed in random KillingIfrit, Allakhazam, and BlueGartr threads, most of which probably don't exist anymore. Wiki editors would find some of it and put it on ffxiclopedia, generally without attribution.

I consider that the first-generation testing. Mechanics like fSTR, pDIF, the secondary randomizer, etc. all came out of this period. It also taught a lot of FFXI players basic stats. In a game where a monster 1 level below you could kill you, without trusts, and where multiboxing was super rare, the feats of this era were epic. Unfortunately, very little of it was preserved.

I consider the second generation of testing to be the stuff that we can still see, most of which came from about 15 years ago. I tried to source stuff when updating mechanics pages on bgwiki back in the day and most of the links still work because they were primarily to FFXIAH and BG, who haven't changed their structure since then. If you want to just crawl through some threads, FFXI-Advanced Math section is a good spot.

Edit1: Something that didn't come through above is that we had a good few years of FFXI where there weren't wikis. There were websites about the game (allakhazam, somepage, various blogs, bbcode forums, various custom websites), but using MediaWiki to make a community-edited information source was very novel when people started doing it.

Edit2: Also, one of the reasons it's important to cite sources is that a lot of the FFXI information is actually not that solid still. SE still doesn't explain the game.

This always piqued my curiosity the most! So many quests involved really random tasks, for example the sub-job quest which involved trading a skull along some other ingredients, from all the tons of items in the game, how was it figured out which exact items to trade? trial from thousands?

maybe i'm misremembering, but don't those NPCs literally tell you what they want? Isacio straight up tells you "i want [x]", then "ok now get me [y]" and "lastly, get [z]", then he grants you support job access.

the real question is how quickly people figured out that this npc (and the one in mhaura) granted subjobs, or where to find magicked skulls best etc, and how that propagated via word-of-mouth or whatever.

but the same thing byrth said applies to these less obvious quests. people would talk about it in game, or someone would ask in alla/KI/BG, and someone who knew, or heard about it from a japanese player, or Who's Uncle Worked At Square Enix would post and it'd spread from there. allakhazam in particular was very proto-wiki in that regard. it was messy, it absolutely led to a lot of speculation and guesses, but it definitely paved the way for the international community to get more organized wikis as people did proper testing.

Brady games was a very popular company that made strategy guides for games. I remember owning the FFXI guide when the game launched in NA and it was a life saver. I found a copy of it online if you want to skim through it to see what it was like.

https://archive.org/details/ffxi-2004-guide/mode/2up

Most of the stuff back then also relied on word of mouth. SE really wanted to push socialization. Having an active linkshell was a must. That's usually where you'd find most info or forming static parties. A part of me misses it, and another part is glad they switched to allowing people to solo. The worst was waiting for hours to form a party and meet up, only for it to end after a few minutes because someone had to leave to eat dinner or something, and then waiting another few hours to find a replacement. This game did NOT value your time.

Worth adding as well that Weekly Famitsu Magazine ran articles on XI for years and years highlighting random quests and stuff, and had periodicals published like Vana’diel Tsushin and Lightning Brigade for more “advanced” stuff. There’s ~300 books/magazines/guides officially licensed in Japanese and these would trickle into English via those early internet communities.

Wasn't skillchains first explained in the pol news?
Vanadiel tribune?