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I get what you're saying praetorian but I really want to get away from this whole random thing in sports because a homerun vs. foulball/fly ball out in certain cases can be attributed to environmental randomness. In Most cases however it has more to do with the torque the batter is able to generate, his ability to recognize the pitch and time his swing and where on the bat he hit the ball.
For a freethrow that bounces off the rim, goes straight up and comes back through or rolls around the rim and falls in or off the backboard it is not random at all. It is completely physics and it's why you are taught to make sure you get good rotation on your shot because then when it lands on the rim it will be more forgiving. Shooter's touch is a REAL thing and it not based on a random roll of the dice.
So while you can't eliminate randomness completely from "real" sports. It's not a cop out whatsoever. It's not like a ball is landing on the rim at the exact same place, at the exact same angle, at the exact same velocity, with the exact same spin and some outside influence comes along and says well your stat sheet says you are an 85% FT shooter and this is one of those 15% times where you miss. If you can duplicate precisely every factor that went into a made freethrow it would go in every single time. People are just imperfect and can't do that. This is different from WoW where you can easily duplicate the exact same action with no variation, standing in one spot in netherstorm casting shadobolt at doctor boom for instance, and an internal mechanism will come along and say "this shadowbolt is going to be resisted fully, this shadowbolt will be partially resisted and the third shadowbolt won't be resisted at all". None of that is even theoretically in your control.
I do agree that poker is probably the best comparison. You can even draw the correlation that until they were able to impliment hole cameras so you could see everyone's cards that it suffered from the same sort of viewability issues that WoW does, in that a lot of drama was lost in the past because you didn't get to see when people were bluffing and whatnot.
Accessibility is also a good point but I still believe a lot has to do with the balancing issue. It gets real old seeing an endless parade of Druids Rogues and Warriors in arena and too many people end up feeling forced to reroll as one of the flavor of the month classes in order to compete. As they add new abilities and new classes it will only get more difficult and whether or not the uneven playing field belief is exaggerated or not the fact that the belief exists at all will be a roadblock.
This is something that starcraft players and warcraft players didn't have to deal with as much because if one race was considered superior you could just play that race and even the playing field without dealing with the accessibility point you mentioned.
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