Most players are a superstitious lot when it comes to the randomness of loot; my Warcraft guild is no exception. We perform an intricate ritual each week before we enter a fresh raid zone, the details of which I cannot reveal. They (meaning the collective developer They) don’t want to reveal how they seed loot for dungeons, I don’t want to reveal the intricate ritual which gives us more perceived control over the seeding. We all realize the ritual is bullshit on some level, of course, but we dare not deviate lest we receive only warlock drops for the night. Again.

Goddamn lucky bastards. And a bigger group of idiots you will not find. Seriously, I’ve started to refer to this as Our Warlock Problem, as in, “what the hell are we gonna do about Our Warlock Problem?”, which you might think means that we’re short on warlocks or that there’s a server-wide shortage of warlocks, but you’d be wrong. It means our warlocks are MORONS. Very well-equipped MORONS.

Anyways. Kylindra of the Cenarion Circle Warcraft realm went through her guild data on Molten Core drops and discovered something very interesting: it’s like ummm, random. Heh, just like They told us. Class drops can be streaky, for sure, but over time, it’s random and evenly distributed. Heh, just like They told us. Read: Pwned by Data: The *Real* Story on Drop Rates.

Reviewing my own guild’s records, our Molten Core drops have been, within reason, evenly distributed. While my perception was that the warlocks were rolling in purple splendor, the truth is more complicated: our rogues have made out like bandits, our druids are getting the shaft and our warlocks should be glad to receive anything at all.

Facts aside, we’ll stick with the intricate ritual — I don’t want to mess with partial success.

Also: Hanzo archive of forum thread as of 5/3/06.