Probability

Unknown

A lot of people have a bit of a misconception about probability and I've seen a number of people somewhat upset due to their lack of understanding. When it comes to odds or probability of winning a reward from missions or pulling a cover from a pack the devs probably aren't lying about the numbers. You may have observed some streaks for what should be randomly decided events which seem to disprove the numbers the devs have reported but you are looking at too small of a sample to make any argument about the statistics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination

One of the most important ideas to wrap your mind around when dealing with this kind of probability is that the outcome of random event A has no bearing on the outcome of random event B. For example, if you have a 50% chance to win a new reward from a prologue mission and you dont get it the first time, the next time you try you are no more or less likely to get that new reward.

Consider flipping a coin. You flip once, heads. You are going to flip again, is it more likely to be tails? No. The coin does not remember the result of all its flips and try to balance itself to 50%. This is known as The Gambler's Fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy

TL;DR - The devs are probably not lying about their probability numbers for rewards. Each "roll" has no bearing on the one before or after it.

Unknown

I learned long ago that the internetz does not understand probability; good links though.

Unknown

I love this post. It seems impossible to flip a coin and get it to land tails 10 times in a row. However, when you look at the probablility of it happening, it is slightly less then 1/1000. With all the people playing and running this experiment multiple times in this game, this should happen. It will seem grossly unfair, but it isn't. Probablity in general tends to seem unfair. In some video games, when the in-game state says 60%, the actual likelihood of it happening is closer to 75%. This is because player don't perceive the success rate accurately. If the designers were truthful about the players chances, people would get mad and claim it's unfair, like we see here. In this case, the dev's were honest in the forum because the game didn't make any claims. If they didn't tell you they changed it, you would probably not have complained as much because you were getting lucky for a 25% chance reward.

Think about a game where you had an action with a 90% success rate. How cheated do you feel when it doesn't work? When the odds are good enough, we think they are a guarantee. When they are in the middle of the range, we assume that roughly every other time will succeed. When they are low, we are trying to get lucky because there's always a chance. I've had some bad luck (I think around 9 20 ISO-8's in a row) and some better luck (I didn't keep track, but I know I had it). It's all perception. It can be annoying at the time, but it still boils down to the same cold, hard statistics.

Going back to the coin example, if you flipped the coin and it landed on tails 10 times in a row, you might be amazed, but you would generally believe it. However, if you told your friend to flip it and asked him what the results were, there is no way you'd believe it. That's what's happening here. You're have a system that you can't observe tell you the results. Because you can't verify it, you don't trust it. Now that you've gotten to this point in my rant, I have attacked you 3 times and stolen all your points. Ha ha ha. So long sucker.

Unknown

I had taken a probability class where on the first day the instructer split us up into groups. 4 groups were to flip a coin 100 times marking the results, and 2 groups were to just make it up and mark the results. All while he was out of the room. He then came back in and indentified which was real or not. He said he rarely failed because a real coin had streaks of heads or tails while the people making it up rarely went past 4, more than that seemed too improbable to them.