I have seen a discussion about random effects, but they applied to previous software versions (I'm running 1.4.3), so I figured this had been addressed. I have 3 cell cyc units that I created step based effects for each color, and had each one set to random group. When I ran each effect at the same time, they all did the same pattern of "randomness." Like I said before, I found a previous thread about it, but not the exact problem. I managed a workaround by changing the channel order of the step in each effect and that pretty much solved my problem, but I thought it was worth mentioning.