Confirmation Bias
This is a scientific term that describes the tendency of people to assign more weight to outcomes that match their preconceived notions than outcomes that contradict them. Simply put, when something happens that matches what we expect, we notice it and tend to use it to confirm our beliefs. When something happens that doesn’t match what we expect, we tend to either not notice it, or disregard it as being “atypical” or otherwise not relevant.
For example, I’ve read several comments over the last few days that “drop rates have been reduced since the update”. This is possible, but I doubt it. I don’t notice any difference. But if you are convinced that this is the case, you will tend to notice cold streaks much more than hot streaks and believe that this is proof that your theory is correct. This isn’t malicious, it’s just how most people work.
This sort of thing also leads to superstitions that get passed around, usually when something happens out of coincidence but a person finds a pattern that they believe explains it. For example, yesterday I saw someone say that if he is having a cold streak trying to farm a purple gear item, he goes and does something else and then comes back and has better luck. No programmer would write code that works in this way, so this is purely psychological. (It’s actually good advice, but not because it actually works, but rather because it encourages you to cool down rather than getting aggravated, so you view things more clearly.)
Another example: when I was having trouble getting Dooku shards someone suggested to me that I not do Dooku first but rather some other character I cared less about, and come back and do Dooku later, because he had better luck this way. I tried it, and it made no difference at all. Again, I highly doubt the developers bothered to tweak the odds based on what order you sim missions. It’s just a cognitive bias he developed because he had better luck doing Dooku later in the day a couple of times.
