[_casperc]

I have another anecdote from WoW regarding randomness.

The raid boss Onyxia (a great big dragon in a cave, which you could only kill once a week as i recall) had a phase where she would take off and fly above the raid. Once in a while she would then do a deep breath, a fire attack which had a high chance at killing you if it hit you.

Now, all sorts of tactics emerged on how to handle the fire attacks. One that stuck for a very long time was that the number of DOTs (Damage Over Time) would lower the number of deep breaths you got.

I'm sure there were other theories as well, but this one stuck for years with raid leaders yelling at warlocks, the class with most dots, to add more dots and even stacking the raid with warlocks to get as many dots as possible (we need at least 4 warlocks to take her).

In the end there was a developer (or just Blizzard employee) who admitted that it was in fact random. This story pops back in my head once in a while because I think we do this a lot on larger scales too without realizing it: See some phenomenon caused by randomness, come up with a theory, and because it is not easily refuted (after all it works most of the time right?) it becomes common knowledge that everyone follows.