I have been looking for a project where I can get to use my statistics knowledge for a while. One thing that does not exist is a list over the popularity of different item in games such as EQ. It’s easy to get a rather large sample given that many people put up profiles where they list every item that they are currently using, that sample could then be used to estimate the number of people that use a specific item.

The complication is that people aren’t necessarily honest when they make their profiles, so the sources have to really reflect the actual game state in some way. In EQ* one could for instance use Magelo’s verified premium profiles or Sony’s record . I’m not sure what’s most popular in WoW, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out. Magelo only contains a subset of all characters, so the selection will probably not be representative for the all characters. Therefor using Sony’s records is probably better.