My motivation to post is closely related to my motivation to play, even though what I actually do when I play tends to have little direct relationship with what I post about. Considering this, until (if) I have motivation to blog again about FFXI, maybe passersby can leave something in the comments to this post about what they might be interested in having me discuss at a later time. (While I do have an idea about showing whether Poisson regression is more appropriate than a simple difference of two binomial proportions for a particular FFXI-related data set, as I do not have any intuition about what would be "better," that would be interesting only to me, really.) Perhaps to stimulate generation or recall of ideas, I will reflect briefly about this blog:
One of the things I wonder about is what a reader of this blog, whether someone who has actually perused most of it or is coming from a link from a FFXI forum, actually applies anything he/she may have gleaned from the multifarious range of topics I've discussed. In some cases, I merely describe simple facts that are, surprisingly, not widely known, like the attack bonus on Yellow Curry Buns compared to Coeurl Subs (why else would you waste your gil buying subs instead of buns?) and chocobo raising/racing information. In other cases, I apply basic statistics to data collected by other players to support or refute things about game mechanics that are either "known" from anecdotal observation or merely assumed without any legitimate evidence. Sometimes I even do probability exercises to compare tactics (optimizing Phantom Roll "algorithms") or differences in equipment as precisely as possible.
In all cases, though, what really motivated me to create these posts was irritation with ignorance. (Many times this irritation was profanely expressed.) Yeah, maybe you can't read Japanese. I can't either, but it doesn't stop me from hitting up the major Japanese wikis to see if there is any information that doesn't show up on FFXIclopedia. And considering that the core of MMORPGs is a random number generator, I would hope the savvier players would have some appreciation that applications of probability and statistics can be very useful to understand how to play the game beyond lootwhore-agonizing about poor drop rates, or just have a better understanding of FFXI and of probability and statistics in general.