Quote Originally Posted by xiozen View Post
You profess to state that the kinematic's/Motenten's spreadsheet is sufficient proof to base your opinions off of... and that's ok... for you.
I don't think I "professed" anything. I think I rather stated, but maybe we're getting into a linguistic knot. As it should be clear enough from my posts English is not my mother language, furtherly it's offtopic to the goals of our discussion so let's leave it away for now, shall we?

The important part about this quoted sentence is that final "for you". Mathematics, at least this kind of math, is not relative. It is, period. It's objective, it's not an opinion, there's not a "for me", a "for you", a "for him".
Motenten is not a perfect being without flaws, he's a human being and hence susceptible to mistakes, but his work has been checked by several people, it's not just his own work. You can check it yourself if you open the xls file and do some deep analysys of the math imbued in that file.
It has reliability.
It has proof because it's not someone stating an opinion or reporting a parse data with a non-statistically reliable number of fights.
It's not someone just sharing his personal opinion.
It's mostly just raw ojbective mathematical data.
As imperfect as that may be (since it's obviously impossible to realize a mathematical model that includes each and every variable that could possibly happen) it's certainly much closer to "perfection" than any of our personal opinion because it's supported by:
1) a reliable, objective and efficient mathematical model
2) a great amount of data
3) it is consistent (reproducible)

It's a bit preposterous that I'm the one advocating such things, since I'm definitely a pretty math-ignorant kind of person, it feels a bit awkward.


It seems that you'd prefer to use someone else's opinion
You see, once again I don't wanna say that you are "wrong", I wanna be optimistic and just guess that you still haven't got the concept behind it.
It is NOT Kinematic's or ANYBODY else's opinion. It is NOT an opinion
Kinematic's spreadsheet is not an assembled document of opinions.
It is an instrument.
You don't just "read" it, you "use" it.
To use a metaphor, it's not a table with a lot of numbers and people's comments suggesting which numbers to use.
It's more like a calculator allowing you to perform several mathematical operations to get objective data. FROM this objective data (which is mostly undeniable and hardly susceptible to opinions) each of us can get to his own personal conclusions and decisions according to the content he has to do, his gear or just his own personal preference.
I trust it's clearer now? I hope Or maybe someone with a better knowledge of the english language might attempt to explain things to you in a more efficient way.

and to have people blindly follow
There's nothing to "blindly follow" in a spreadsheet. It has no indications. As I mentioned before it's just an instrument in your own hands. He just provides raw objective data, it's you who decide what to do with that data and which conclusions to get to.

But again, why are we discussing so much about Kine's or anybody elses's spreadsheet? What's the point? A Spreadsheet is mostly used to fine-tune a character or to make a better decision on something you're unsure of. There can be some big surprises there.


The big point of our discussion here is rather the thing about slow, and that has little to do with Kine's spreadsheet. Did you manage to read the link I suggested above? Even my grandmother could probably understand it.
Hell, even I am able to understand that sort of things and trust me I've never been good with math and related stuff.


I can only assume the blind leading the blind
Stop making silly philosophy.
We're not in a lesson of sociology here, and we're not discussing about the moral value of leading people and people being led.
No space to make ideology or even discuss about them.
We're just talking about data and objective mathematical stuff, don't take a further step please and try to stay focused on this.
I don't know if someone's been rude to you or if you're taking this too personal.
If you just don't fully grasp the importance of the Haste mechanic in a game like FFXI it's no big deal, nobody did at first, right?
It's no problem, just get yourself informed, feed yourself with that "knowledge" you talk of, and you'll realize for yourself what other people have been more or less educatedly trying to tell you