Umbrellas at six paces?

In the interests of transparency, here's a link to a discussion in which the causes of player misfortune are laid bare.

There is most certainly nothing wrong with being absurdly lucky or unlucky on the programming end of things—and even if there is something wrong with the RNG program at the theoretical level, the point is still moot as it relates to the topic at hand; since your "good luck" or "ill luck" in reality overlaps 1-to-1 and onto with the results returned by the game, I don't see how it matters much whether the RNG literally simulates the condition of absolute randomosity in reality. As long as it's a comparable simulation, the task of the RNG is being carried out effectively.

Not to be antagonistic to xKiv, since he hardly deserves it,

but e.g. the point about 'there's always someone better' is literally a self-defeating non-argument. I'm also not sure how the impossibility of human omniscience is relevant to anything.

A side-note: you're assuming that it's unreasonable for a Master Thief to occasionally fail a simple heist, or to have a run of bad luck. It isn't. It would be unreasonable to expect an individual to always succeed at a task, regardless of their skill level; hell, most humans can't even put one foot in front of the other successfully 100% of the time.

Why was I interested when normally I duck numbers like they're made of death? I really dislike the game design in FL around the RNG and wanted to learn more about it.

Mostly, it doesn't make narrative sense. I'm a Master Thief and I'm losing a Very Modest skill check literally 10 times in a row? This happens often enough that it's frustrating. I'm losing out on precious action points to explore more of the game!

Yes, they may be using an industry standard RNG, but I feel there could be more sophisticated filtering/framework/design built around it to produce a statistically-sound system which has

- less frustrating, more intuitive gameplay
- integrated narrative

That's why I was intrigued when xKiv was talking about the different reset duration options, such as during the course of 1 session or globally across servers (totally mangling the actual terms, but I'm writing out the gist).

Because if you're flipping a coin heads or tails, the odds are 50/50 but in an infinite timeline it's statistically "correct" for the coin to come up heads 1 million times in a row as long as it ends up tails 1 million times somewhere in the tail end of infinity. It just would be a hell of a lot less fun playing with this time table.

And regarding this line: [ it's a little presumptive to come right back and say 'you're the game dev, but you could be wrong and your work is broken' ] Yes....? And we are the game players, who like the game enough to discuss it among like-minded fans, both the parts we like and the parts we dislike, with constructive comments. No one is infallible, as far I'm aware?
And the more I think about it, I really don't think there NEEDS to be people who have such long (good or bad) luck streaks. There could be tweaks made to alleviate the issue that obviously a lot of people are having.