Also on AOL
- Autos
- Technology
- Lifestyle
- Gaming
- Finance
- Entertainment on AOL
- Lifestyle on AOL
- Sports on AOL
- Travel on AOL
- More on AOL
Featured Galleries
Joystiq
© 2013 AOL Inc. All rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Trademarks | AOL A-Z HELP | About Our Ads

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-12-2011 @ 11:27AM
Dimmak said...
Maybe I should rephrase this, the data sample is only from folks reading this website. You have 2500 sample of a specific subset of much larger subset. In medical testing you have a control group and testing group from as a diversified sample as you can manage. I don't think this particular subset is reflective to entirety of the wow populace. And as Pyromelter mentions the standard deviation would be very useful in interpreting this data.
If you have 2500 people who average say 20k gold but in there only 10 people have 5 million gold you suddenly have a huge statistical skew. The standard deviation lets you know that those 10 people are way outside the bell curve. You can then eliminate say those more than 2 deviations out and get a really good idea what most players have gold wise.
Presenting the data differently with more information might show that the largest cross section is "middle classed" or at least what most folks have for gold reserves. Then you look at it go hmm I only have 10k gold, but so does almost everyone else as opposed to holy crap these guys have millions of gold what the hell I only have 10k!!!
Reply
11-12-2011 @ 1:13PM
Xsinthis said...
These are the reasons I DE-emphasized the average so much and focus more on the distribution, because a few people with multi million really skew the average. Also, the sample was not souly from those reading this website, I got a large number of response simply running an add on the official wow forums (EU and US), MMO-C, The Consortium Forums, and a few independent gold blogs also ran it.