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

most of bg is well sourced, take this page for example

https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Enmity

look at the very bottom for links to testing

too many names to list, but many of them are still around in some form or another and might feel like chiming in.

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.