That's interesting, because in WarCraft 3, by Blizzard, randomness is designed to be "fair". They use a special word for it but i can't remember it at the moment.
For example, there are certain items that can give you a chance to blow a "critical hit", a critical hit multiplies your damage with X.
Say an item gives you 30% chance to do 2X damage. However, the randomness has memory and is designed to distribute the critical hits evenly by gradually increasing the probability for every non critical hit and resetting it for every critical hit. So the first time you hit the chance isn't actually 30% but more like 10%. If you miss 3 times the chance of the fourth hit being a critical is more like 40-50%. The hit after that will be back on 10% probability. (Just picking numbers out of the blue to illustrate the concept, I'm sure there's some more thought through math behind it)
As the nr of hits goes towards infinity, 30% of them will still be critical but the chance of getting streaks of non-critical or streaks of critical hits is very low.
In practice it works very well from my experience. It is however not completely exploit-proof, you could for example go and increase your probability of initially blowing a critical hit by first making a few hits on NPCs and then go to battle against a harder enemy. But that's more of a hypothetical exploit as the time and risk of doing this simply isn't worth those few extra percent.
I guess applying this concept on item drops available to every player on a whole MMO-server isn't as simple/fair as remembering the outcome of hits for a single player.
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That's interesting, because in WarCraft 3, by Blizzard, randomness is designed to be "fair". They use a special word for it but i can't remember it at the moment.
For example, there are certain items that can give you a chance to blow a "critical hit", a critical hit multiplies your damage with X.
Say an item gives you 30% chance to do 2X damage. However, the randomness has memory and is designed to distribute the critical hits evenly by gradually increasing the probability for every non critical hit and resetting it for every critical hit. So the first time you hit the chance isn't actually 30% but more like 10%. If you miss 3 times the chance of the fourth hit being a critical is more like 40-50%. The hit after that will be back on 10% probability. (Just picking numbers out of the blue to illustrate the concept, I'm sure there's some more thought through math behind it)
As the nr of hits goes towards infinity, 30% of them will still be critical but the chance of getting streaks of non-critical or streaks of critical hits is very low.
In practice it works very well from my experience. It is however not completely exploit-proof, you could for example go and increase your probability of initially blowing a critical hit by first making a few hits on NPCs and then go to battle against a harder enemy. But that's more of a hypothetical exploit as the time and risk of doing this simply isn't worth those few extra percent.
I guess applying this concept on item drops available to every player on a whole MMO-server isn't as simple/fair as remembering the outcome of hits for a single player.
I see most people refering to that as a Pseudorandom Distribution, although this is Dota terminology so I'm not 100% sure its the same word.