MuffinMetrics — A New Era Of FFXI Simulation & G

It looks like it may be a web app, which is the best option for such software as long as the hosting web server remains active and available (and ad-free). This is a huge positive that massively expands the reach of the application to the community, who may be uncomfortable with local software downloads.

MuffinMetrics includes total HP, MP (BLM Death damage and Myrkr return), and defense stats, which can be useful to compare estimated enemy damage to players (enemy DPS!). Seeing block rates included would be nice too. Neither enemy damage nor player block rates appear to be available at the moment, though.

The project appears to be far from complete. The post itself appears to be a "please fund my idea through patreon" post, rather than a "play with version 1.0.0" release post.

If the project is a web application, then there may be no way for advanced users to make changes. Any and all adjustments must be requested before being rejected or implemented, which introduces significant delays to otherwise simple personal changes.

A web application introduces the potential of being taken offline due to a lack of funding or for personal reasons (similar to the loss of some useful BG Wiki guides).

The software is not open source. You must trust that the calculations are mathematically correct with no way to verify or locate issues/operations yourself.

The post mentions a "goal" to keep MuffinMetrics ad-free. This suggests ads are already being considered. I dislike even the idea of ads, but I'm not sure how expensive it may be to host this online.

The application appears to be limited to manual set building and single damage calculations (not simulations). Its functionality is limited to the equivalent of the "Quicklook" buttons from existing software, but without TP return and no DPS simulation option yet. It's not clear if the "Expected Damage" from MuffinMetrics is an estimate of the mean, median, or mode of the "true-to-game" damage distribution.

There is no "find the potentially best set automatically and let me work from there" option. It's manual from start to finish, which is the old spreadsheet method. I do not see this as a huge negative, but the author claims "new era" so I expected significant improvements on all fronts, similar to my moving from single-job spreadsheets to all jobs Python software.

"[MuffinMetrics] derives all attribute-based stats dynamically. . . This gives MuffinMetrics precision among FFXI tools."

• This has been standard in all spreadsheets and calculators to the point of not being worth mentioning and is similar to saying "Uses state of the art arithmetic to sum stats across equipment and attributes." It's text to fill white space and try to sound impressive to those outside the field.
• I'm not sure why this was described as "dynamic". What makes these calculations dynamic if there is no gear swapping (TP + WS sets) calculations?
• "giving precision" has not been demonstrated or quantified in any way. Does the application's claimed "true-to-game" damage calculations match observed values to within 1%? 5%? 10%?
• Using the words "precision among FFXI tools" suggests the application is more precise existing tools. I do not believe that any effort went into even simply comparing numerical outputs with existing tools considering the author was unaware of how the existing simulator/calculator handles PDL.

Comprehensive Gear Library - nearly every item in FFXI, including event and level 1 lockstyle gear

• Including nearly every piece of equipment in the game seems nice on paper. However, I see almost all pre-ilvl equipment as bloat that must be scrolled through to find the useful gear. My software includes over 1500 unique items, but nearly all of them have some relevance in modern FFXI.
• A case could be made for private servers. However, the well-maintained private servers tend to apply closed-source modifications to damage equations for a fresh feel, which makes most retail-based calculations largely useless.

True Damage Calculations - BG-Wiki-aligned fSTR, PDIF, WSC, and WS parameters

• I do not consider this to be a "feature", let alone a "core feature".
• Using the generally well-understood and well-tested BG Wiki equations is an expectation. If these are not used, and no justified alternative is presented, then the application is simply wrong.

Compare Page - analyze two full gearsets side-by-side

• This is a nice feature that has been requested to me at least twice in the past and resulted in a separate web app just for it. Unfortunately I haven't ranked this as high priority for my software so I've put it off. I'm glad it's planned to show up in MuffinMetrics in some form.

GearSwap Integration - export formatted sets directly into FFXI

• The application may output a few lines of formatted text which can be pasted into a lua file. This is generally very useful when building sets and lua.

Clipboard Load/Save - save or share builds instantly

• This seems identical to the previous feature for "gearswap integration" and does not need to be mentioned twice.

Ambuscade Cape Creator - experiment with any augment combo

• I assume these capes are saved to the web-app server and bound to a session ID or login. Otherwise, you may need to manually recreate or import your custom capes each time you re-open the app, which would be an inconvenience.
• This is a useful feature to test niche capes that are not included by default in other software, which requires manual (but permanent) creation via text file manipulation.

Level + Master Level Scaling - stats, HP/MP, and skills scale automatically:

• Why is "scaling automatically" mentioned at all? Was the expectation that the user would manually input these stats previously?
  
• Again, I see no benefit for pre-99 gameplay simulations/calculations. Given how fast solo leveling is in modern FFXI, simulations regarding damage for levels 1-98 will be out of date nearly on the same timescale it took to run them. This is entirely a lost cause when considering power leveling.
• This is useful for retail-based 75-cap communities, but likely useless for all private servers, which may use custom damage formulae.

Magic damage is generally well understood due to the lack of randomizers. However, as far as I'm aware, there has been zero published testing for white magic and blue magic base damage variables (M and V values tested against dMND, dINT, dCHR, etc for all spells). Without these values, the reported damage outputs would be no better than educated guessing.

I believe many base pet stats are not well known. Using /checkparam <pet> will show basic pet stats, but a significant amount of testing is still required to obtain "true-to-game" damage calculations for pets as this MuffinMetrics claims. I have seen no posts about such testing and would not trust any damage estimates without it.

Both of these points suggest the author plans to perform extensive testing to determine the necessary values. This is a significant time investment that has likely been severely underestimated and will not be completed on a reasonable timescale.