With the new, awesome, armory system (maybe my favorite addition to the game in years!) I'm doing a lot more thieving -- being able to switch from a Trials build to a Thieving build is great! I have maxed out skills but haven't used them in ages. So in the last week I've been farming safeboxes for Leads and pickpocketing for the Black Market Mogul Achievement (920k and counting!). In doing so, I've seen some really strange things.
I was failing to force a lock (Intermediate or Advanced) more than not so I started tracking it. In 125 intermediate or advanced boxes, I failed 71 times. My displayed success rate is, at its lowest, 75% (for an advanced) and higher for an intermediate. That's about a 43% success rate when I should be over 75%. But it gets stranger. For multiple boxes in a row, I would fail, fail, succeed. Meaning it took me three attempts on 2-5 boxes in a row! It's almost like the RNG gets stuck. Mathematically possible? Sure. But highly improbably. I finally got the last lead I needed so I stopped tracking.
Then onto pickpocketing. I didn't track my overall success rate but I only picked targets that had 100% or 90% success. My success rate at 90% was far lower but I didn't track it. What was stranger was the consecutive failures. I'm doing the standard pick-pick-stab and my success rate is 100% then 90%. I always wait for the green 90% to light up and only pick a stationary target. At one point I failed 9 consecutive 90% attempts. I also had failure streaks of 6-8 multiple time. I never succeeded more than 3x in a row.
Obviously part of this is due to the display lagging behind the drop in success. But even at a 70% success rate, these are absurdly low. I estimate that about 2% of the time, I pick when the display reads 90% but the actual percent has dropped back to 70%. I'm estimating this based on an actual count of failing 2% of my 100% success chances.
Has any of this been addressed or am I just that unlucky? And, of course, if you want to respond with "sample size is too low," feel free. But also post your calculation.