For instance, when you think of someone and they happen to call your home right then it seems very odd. But what you don’t realize is there’s countless times you thought of that person and they didn’t call. It’s the reason that “psychics” and folks like John Edwards who talk to the dead are successful - nobody remembers their misses and remembers their hits (they tend to get about twenty misses to a hit).

Actually, that’s another excellent example of superstitions - at no point in the dragon raid do you have to take off your armor. I hadn’t actually even heard of players doing that yet, so it’s a new one for me.

My IC family loved to get together to fish, to chat and generally goof around to kill the boredom. Somehow, someone made the connection that within a few seconds of someone using the “chant” emote, someone would get a nibble. The frequency of this occuring seemed to increase the more people that chanted.

Soon, when we found ourselves in a long “dead” period, we’d get the whole family chanting (even our sentient pets). We’d even teach the “trick” to our new family members who were learning the fishing ropes.

We knew it was silly, but it was still fun

In EQ1, my guild was hosting a LAN party and attacking the Tower of Frozen Shadow. The final boss, Tserrina, of ToFS is a random spawn that happens immediately after killing a bat on the top floor of the dungeon. Normally, you could expect to get one and only one spawn of the boss from the twenty or so bats that were up there.

Well, I was the DJ at said LAN party, but someone had brought a bunch of music to add to the mix. When it was getting late and people were becoming hyper-caffienated, someone complained about the music. So I put on Copacabana by Barry Manilow. Immediately, we killed a bat and the boss spawned. The song played out but an hour or so later someone requested it again. Towards the end of the song, we killed a bat and the boss spawned. Someone made the connection and suggested that we leave Copacabana on repeat. We killed eight more bats and each time the boss spawned. By this point, people were getting sick of hearing the song and so I turned it off … we killed a bat and … nothing.

Of course its coincidence … but we submitted it as a strat the next day to Allakhazam and from then on Copacabana is my guild’s official “spawn song”. If you can’t get something to spawn … play Copacabana … it can’t hurt.

Besides that, a pure random decision on loot is the most boring thing you could do. How epic and fun do you think it is for a warrior to always randomly find wands instead of swords.

The DDO raid thing? That’s because there ARE a load of stupid things you need to do - mostly involving taking off your armour, running over a bridge, standing there for 30 minutes then wiping in 15 seconds against the boss - if you’re lucky as a fighter you get to bash a pillar. If you’re unlucky, you get to be the sod who pulls to the level start. which involves dying about 5-10 times..

Regarding the solution of DDO, “Finally we made chests an invalid target for the diplomacy skill, then players whined that all the points they put into diplomacy were worthless because we “nerfed” the skill!” This was absolutely the worst thing they could have done. Their fix only confirms in players’ minds that there was a diplomacy bug, and the developers were only lying about it until they could release a patch for it. The appropriate solution would have been to mock the player by giving the party a sardonic message each time the diplomacy skill was used on the chest. Think of the messages you would get in the old adventures games when you tried to do something silly like use a lockpick on yourself.