Tales from the General Forum

Continuing southwest along the copper vein of people spotting patterns in random numbers, we reach the aluminum cap that is Asheron's Call and the Wi-flag.

This is old news by now for people who followed AC, I'd guess, but since I never personally paid much attention to that MMO, the link made an interesting read. The short story is (in non-technical terms, since I know my mom reads this (Hi mom!)) that when you started up a new character in AC, that character got an unique ID that was essentially random. There was a bug in the code that meant that whoever had the lowest ID in a group would get attacked more often than the others in the group, and if you happened to have a really low number, you'd get attacked more often in every group you were in.

Why's it called a Wi-flag? Because there was a guy with a character named Wi who had phenomenally bad luck with getting attacked by things. It became a running gag in his guild, you know, the developers put in a thing where if you're Wi, you have bad luck. The story spread, and it became a long-running semi-myth: some characters were just unlucky. But of course, if you've got hundreds of thousands of people playing a game, there're bound to be some that just have strings of bad luck, and they tend not to remember the times when things go well for them. In the case of AC, though, there was actually a real thing in the code that was leading to this!