Pet Data Collecting

[Ashlataar]

One of my hobbies is collecting data. For a long time I collected data on resource gathering, like herbs and ore, so I could work out the best zones and most efficient routes for farming particular nodes.

Now it's pets, and pet quality ratios! Lately I've been giving over to flying circuits around a zone and engaging every pet I come across, and recording its quality, and have slowly been building up a compendium spreadsheet detailing the percentages of coming across each quality of each pet. On the side, I also added a column to tell me the approximate ratio of pet types within a zone, although I feel this item of data is more limited as I can't perfectly visit every single pet spawn on the zone.

I wanted to post here for two reasons: Firstly, I wanted to ask any budding staticians out there what a reasonable sample size would be before my data could be reliable at all? Would 500 samples of each pet be acceptable? More, or less? Some zones are producing samples of that size, but there are still many zones to do. Most of my samples are around the 100-250 mark.

Secondly, I was wondering if there are any talented addon authors who would be interested in advising me on scripting an addon that could do this process automatically. I am having to manually engage a pet, search for the pet in my list and add 1 to the number I have next to it's name. It could go a lot faster if I just engaged and forfeited, and the addon recorded the data internally. Perhaps I could retrieve the data with a command, or to some sort of notepad file. Any help would be much appreciated!

I am certainly happy to start sharing these results with the community as I think it might be helpful for people hunting rares to have a rough idea of the chances.

P.S. - If anyone is concerned that other pet hunters might be inconvenienced by my profuse pet hunting - I always post in general if I find a rare, or if I come across a pet that doesn't spawn very often, and will logout (thus resetting the pet) for them if they want it.

[Hellomynameis]

I've been on the lookout for something similar a while: http://www.warcraftpets.com/community/f ... f=2&t=1468

..havn't found it yet.