What does randomness look like?
Back in the day I was in a raiding guild in World of Warcraft. And back then, each boss monster in a raid dungeon had a loot table, and when you killed it, your raid got a few pieces of random loot.<p>And I don't know how many times I, and the other guy in the guild who understood statistics, had to explain to the others that random doesn't mean uniform. If a certain piece of armour has a 1/X chance to drop from a boss, what people <i>think</i> should happen is that if they kill that boss X times, they should see it drop once.<p>But the reality was of course that loot was very non-uniform. Some pieces we saw lots of times, and other pieces very rarely, despite them having the same drop chance. And the players who wanted those pieces that happened to be rare for our guild, got very, very angry.<p>We saw the same things on the official message boards, players were <i>furious</i> after having spent a year killing the same raid boss once a week, and <i>never</i> seeing a certain piece drop for them. But simple math shows that with million of players, tens of thousands of raiding guilds, some of those will see very streaky results.<p>These days in World of Warcraft, boss monsters drop tokens instead, and when you have X tokens, you can exchange that for a piece of armour, or a weapon, guaranteed. And noone complains about the random loot anymore.