What does randomness look like?

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 think should happen is that if they kill that boss X times, they should see it drop once.

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.

We saw the same things on the official message boards, players were furious after having spent a year killing the same raid boss once a week, and never 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.

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.

But looking at the plot on the map, it appears that the higher incidence of bombs is focused on a specific region. The Poisson distribution doesn't account for the fact that a lot of the squares with a high incidence of bombs are adjacent to each other. From my layman's understanding, it appears that the bombs were in fact targeted on a specific area, but that there was a random offset from this area regarding where the bombs actually landed. Because of this, you'd see randomness in the distribution. But the distribution of bombs wasn't really perfectly random.

Is the author deliberately avoiding this point, or is there something I've misunderstood?

And you know, it is always possible in those situations that there is a broken pseudo-random number generator involved. But of course, that's really hard to tell too because real randomness is so unrandom seeming.

This bit is not correct. All of the most desirable items (except darkmoon trinkets and tier sets) drop directly from raid bosses, and people still complain about the outcomes of random loot.

In Everquest when you cast a spell, there was a chance the spell would fizzle.

Occasionally, someone would get a streak of fizzles. Many argued this was just the normal streakiness you expect when you are do repeated independent trials. Some insisted that fizzles streaks were more common than you'd expect based on that model.

Finally, a statistician who also played EQ spend some time gathering data, and determined that fizzling was not independent. Your fizzle chance was an increasing function of the length of your current fizzle streak, up to a cap.

Things like that give a game character.