I am afraid that practically anything can occur based on probability, specially with low drop rates and sample size. 10 heads in a row when tossing a coin? Nothing impresive. 2 mythic gear pieces in the same chest? I have seen a few screenshots. I have even seen getting 2 mythic relics or 3 mythic gear pieces in the same chest, which according to my estimations would have a chance to happen way lower than 1 in a milion. But when we take all the players, all the time they play and all the chests they open the sample size becomes big enough for nearly everything to happen to some players, be it something great as those examples I have given, or something frustrating as extremely bad luck streaks.
I have experienced getting an average of 1 mythic relic drop in chests every 3 days for a month, and then not getting a single one in 2 months. Failing to get any mythic gear drop in weeks or getting 5 the same day. That is the essence of chance and probability. I believe that the issue is that the human brain seems to pay more attention to bad news than to good ones, so we tend to overlook or even forget good streaks and only remember the bad ones. Therefore, instead of seeing a “compensating” effect when sometimes we are lucky, sometimes unlucky and sometimes we are just in between, we tend to believe that we are more unlucky than anything else, which makes us blame probability itself.
Additionally we have no idea of the inner workings of the game. The devs carefully hide most info on most drop rates, therefore making it impossible to know if our results are within what it should be expected. Maybe it is just that what we had believed to be average was in fact a lucky streak. And of course the probability is skewed, the devs define it. And the lower the probability of good drops the more likely we are to suffer from bad streaks.
Now, it won’t be me who will bet on everything working as “it should” (which as I said before we don’t even know). We have seen too many things failing in this game and not being fixed until any of us raised it to be sure that there is nothing else that is not working as the devs intend. I want to make sure we don’t forget (or for those they weren’t yet here, that they get to know it) the issue with the crafter RNG we had last year. In summary, many players reported getting too many of the same gear piece with doing random crafts. The devs said they tested it and everything was fine. But more and more players started to give evidence that something was off, with multiple cases of several crafts in a row being the same item. Finally, the bug was found and fixed, but it should still stand out as an example of how we cannot always trust game RNG and dismiss our observations as probability outliers.
So even if personally I believe there is nothing new here, just bad luck streaks that repeat and change over time and players, I won’t be the one to disregard what is being argued here. First, because the feeling of frustration is understandable, real and contrary to the enjoyment of the game, I have personally suffered it a lot when it seemed that I was wasting my time getting no reward whatsoever for my efforts. Be it something within the normal workings of the game or the result of some change, too many players experiencing this shouldn’t be good for the game. And second, because as we saw with the crafter RNG issue we cannot trust blindly that RNG is working as it should. I trust Jeto that there hasn’t be any recent change they know of, but forgive us if from time to time, and specially when the frustration piles up high, we start to be suspicious of bugs and errors that even the devs may be not aware of.