It should be obvious that it is ridiculous for the system to work in such a way that people are encouraged to play less.
I agree with Oleg on this point.
I grinded out all the large shrooms for my mod2600. It took over the 5 months to do it part time in the evenings after work. I only had these times to work with, but over time, I was able to discern a "wave" pattern of drops. I first started noticing it when the same avatars would show up at certain times and "get the drop" and disappear. I would see them global on other mobs, then pop in the area, get the drop, then disappear and I would see them global in some other area and/or activity which clearly showed over time they were just popping in to get the drop and leave. Other times avatars would be sitting in their vtol waiting, and would pop out at the appropriate time and get the drop, then jump back in their vtol and wait for the next "wave". It was easy to see what was happening with the global rare message. But people figured out that if you held one shroom in carried inventory then it wouldn't announce the loot in the global message so that wasn't really reliable.
I noticed that even though they were there when the drops came, that they didn't always get the drop, sometimes I would get the drop. Also, sometimes the drop would come before the normal time and I would get it, then they would show up and grind for a while until they realized it wasn't dropping for that time period and leave. Sometimes it would come after the drop period came and went and nobody got a drop and they left. Sometimes one would drop, they would get it and leave and I would immediately get one or two more drops (a very rare but welcome event!).
The bottom line for me was, I only had so much time to hunt, over time the waves didn't really matter to me, I knew if I just kept grinding I was going to get a shroom, and I was always getting some loot back and there was the very rare occasional uber hof that was always a possibility ( I never got one on them, but some did) but I was always getting skills!
As for US timing of big loots, I can say that for many years I have been in situations where I was grinding mobs for hours and hours and getting shit, but knowing that it felt like some big loot was building up, but I would have to go to bed to get up and go to work, and low and behold, I would check the hof board the next night and sure enough, while I was asleep or at work, someone would hit big. So often, weather it was real or for some other reason, it always has appeared that the majority of the big loots were not on US time, but that could be just my imagination, I would guess someone with access could analyze the tracker data over time and see what the distribution by timezone would look like. As long as I can remember there has been a running joke about having to be on swedish time or be from there to get the big loots, I don't know that there is a lot of proof for it, but real or not, it has always felt like there was something to the speculation.
Random should be random!