Quote Originally Posted by 'OzPhoenix',index.php?page=Thread&postID=75789#pos t75789
Actually that's not strictly speaking true. Computers cannot simply "pick a number" but instead use a variety of complicated forumlas and other operations to "fake" random number generation. Would this result in a statistically meaningful pattern - potentially, but highly unlikely.

That said, I have noticed rather improbable runs of collection quest drops. For example, Hercular's Rod - 3 guys in a row got it. The drop rate being 1% makes that a rather unlikely event (about 1 in a million). I couldn't get it for the 4th or 5th guy and so abandoned the quest for all of them.

The point to this is, it's not impossible for the way WoW generates random numbers to create a pattern, dependent on supposedly unrelated events.
Drop rates for quest items will show up on the various web sites as being a much lower percentage than they really are - the reason being that quest items will only drop from a mob when a player has that particular quest (well duh!), but the rest of the time when the same mob is being killed, the quest item will of course not drop. The drop data gets fed back to the database in question, but the data gathering tool doesn't take into account whether a player was on the quest when they killed the mob. So all players not on the quest, but are killing the same mobs that drop the quest item and then feeting the drop data back mean that the drop percentage of the quest item gets artificially pushed down, becuase the quest item never drops for these players.

Cheers,
Stealthy