All That Other Stuff I Do

It seems like I get a fair amount of, I dunno, flack or maybe some form of resentment in my social because I'm never around or too busy doing something when I am in there.  I understand where they are coming from when I read these statements, but it has never been my intent not to do things with the social.  The problem seems to stem from when a lot of the folks want to do things it's often spontaneous, which just doesn't jive with me that well.  I like to have things planned, I'll sit at work and plan out my entire evening in the game and once I have those plans set, I'm extremely reluctant to change them.  Doesn't seem fair to my shell, and I don't do it out of spite or anything, but getting me to change my plans is...just hard to do.  My event schedule looks like this:

Sunday afternoon: Dynamis
Sunday night: Freetime
Monday night: Limbus
Tuesday night: Einherjar
Wednesday night: Dynamis
Thursday: Freetime, usually spent recooping XP
Friday night: Limbus
Saturday morning: Einherjar
The rest of Saturday: Free time, usually I campaign or, like lately, plan missions and the like.

The quickest thing on that list is Einherjar, which takes around 90 minutes, Dynamis can take up to five hours, with Limbus falling in between at around three hours (I do a lot there).  At some point I need to find room for Salvage and Sky too.  *sigh* It'd be nice if I won the lottery so I could sit at home all day instead of working, maybe then I'd have time for the things I want to do.

Occasionally people have heard (read) me talk about my databases or spreadsheets, but I never really explain what it is I'm talking about.  In real life I'm a Database Administrator/Programmer, so it should come as no surprise that that nerd crap occasionally overlaps my FFXI nerd crap.  One of the things I developed was a gear/food database that allows me to search off damn near any stat (the Advanced Filter on FFXIAH is an example, albeit, a very limited one, of what it does).  This started first as a spreadsheet, and quickly morphed into a database.  The initial database was built over a year ago and it took me a long time to get the data in the database (like months, I literally researched every item).  About two months ago I overhauled the whole damn thing into a superpimp look-up tool, but for the 3-4 solid months spent working on this thing, I've used it maybe a dozen times.  It looks really cool though.

The spreadsheets are something I use daily in the game, one is my tracking workbook, it has morphed a lot as time has went by.  The initial idea behind it was to project the gear I would want/need for my Ninja (this started when it was around level 50), at first it was easily obtainable stuff with some AH prices mixed in, but as I got to 75 and really learned how to play the job, I started to realize there were a lot of holes in my spreadsheet.  Over time it has went from tracking dd, tank and ws gear to tracking tank, provoke, supertank, evasion, dd, ws, throwing, shadows and ninjutsu.  Think about that for a second, I've researched gear from 1-75 in every slot for each of those categories.  Even nerdier, about 4 months ago I wrote a bunch of code so that I could see the gear I need at any level on 1 screen without scrolling (I pat myself on the back daily for adding this bit).  Once I had the grid layout for the gear I needed/wanted, I set up another spreadsheet with the AH prices.  Like the grid, this started out simple, it gave me the name of the gear and the price, but it is a small marvel of it's own now.  I track availability, last sold price, average price, the difference in those prices, nq prices, how I can obtain it if I can't buy it and as if that weren't enough I set it up so I could see a breakdown of costs per category.  So, for example, when I look at my Shop list I see that I need another 1.1M gil to get the tank gear I want.  But did I stop there?  No, I also have a spresheet that tracks all my macros in the event I lose them or just want to tweak things.  All that was for my NIN, I did the same thing for my BLM too.

Still, I couldn't leave well enough alone, and over time I've also added a list of game maps I still need (all of them are CoP maps btw), an inventory list of all the gear on my main AND my mules (and yeah, I know how much all that gear is worth too), I have a spreadsheet for all my merits and projected merits and I keep track of the gil I have on my accounts, my zeni balance, my ichor balance and for those times I'm really bored, I can keep track of how many Allied Notes I've obtained since my last medal evaluation.  Did I mention this is all in one workbook?

Over the summer I created another workbook for crafting and, not to toot my own horn, it's better than the ones most people have available to them.  I spent a month refining it so that it truly did take into account breaks and hq, and it can go from single synths to stack synths.  I included the AH fees just to refine things further.  That spreadsheet has helped me project costs and determine whether the losses (or better yet, gains) are worth the time I'd have to spend farming.

So yeah, I can be pretty busy for a damn game, but I enjoy it and wouldn't have it any other way.