you were just "unlucky" suck it up.

Honestly, it happens. It's probably extremely rare, but at 27% per attempt, that's a 73% chance of failure -- not exactly in your favor. I mean, what are you trying to invent? Ships? or do you just have low skills?

This isn't about probability, it's about statistics. Come back when you've conducted 1000 inventions and still have only 97% failure, then you might just have a legit complaint.

You're what? #5212th person to cry about how he's got a ****** success in a limit run? Funny how we never hear back from any of them after someone says "Do more invention job"

I've completed 22,580 invention attempts in 2011, I've had some bad runs, some good runs but in the end, it all balances out to what you're skilled at.

If those 22580 attempts had all been made at 27% chance, hitting a single 44/45 fail streak in all of 2011 would still be only be 1 (one) in 169(ish) probable. That's 0.6%. Ish. Per 22580 attempts. Which took a year.

If that happened to you, would you still come here angry that the system is broken? Chances are, no because you ended up on the good side of the distribution; likely you'd chalk it up to good luck rather than "baw broken".

Inversely, it is 99.999903% likely that you do not get only one success in only 45 tries @ 27% chance.
That's pretty damn likely.

If I had an ISK for every one of these posts...

Seriously, you were just unlucky, suck it up, etc.

45 runs is NOTHING, it's such a small sample that using it to verify whether the numbers are correct is literally stupid. Even if you did get the right numbers, it would still be stupid to draw conclusions from such a small sample. You can flip a fair coin 5000 times and have 5000 heads. The likelihood of THAT is very very small, but it's not 0 (i.e. the colloquialism that should apply is "unlikely" rather than "impossible"). If that happens to you and you know the coin is fair, congrats, you're seriously unlucky. That doesn't change the fact that the probability of tails or heads is 50%. The probability of you getting shitass results is different from the probability of each individual event occurring, don't confuse the two.

Run the numbers for two years like I've done, and you'll see that they really do work out pretty much right on. In fact, just do it for two months running a lot of jobs to have a sample of several hundred data points, and you'll probably see that you're approaching the expected %

Also, I just ran 50 drone invention jobs and got 45 BPCs (true story, not just a "for example"). If that happened to you, would you still come here angry that the system is broken? Chances are, no because you ended up on the good side of the distribution; likely you'd chalk it up to good luck rather than "baw broken". I've also run a few dozen jobs in a row before with 0 successful results. Very frustrating on an initial emotional response level, but I know that the numbers will work out in the end over a large enough sample (and they have), which tends to make me shrug it off and just go buy more datacores. This is why you need to have capital in excess of the estimated amount to do invention safely, as you may hit a rough patch like that and you should be able to bankroll your business.

PS: this might be of interest if you want some theoretical basis to steel yourself in case of terriawful invention luck. Pretty basic stats but helpful and applicable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_variable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_distributed_random_variables

I would like to introduce you to the little thing known as a random number generator

If you can not understand that then please go to a game that is much more baby friendly.

PS, I used to run well over 1000 invention jobs PER DAY, so I'm well versed in invention. Call it bad luck, ****** game design, your a moron! No matter what you call it, in the end and with thousands to tens of thousands of invention jobs, you will balance out to the "so-called" statistical chances of invention.

(The system seems to have lost my original post. If this is a double post, please remove it.)

I've made 45 invention attempts @ 27% chance of success. Out of these, 1 (one) succeeded. Unless my math fails me, the likelihood of only getting one success in 45 tries @ 27% chance, is somewhere in the region of 9.7*10^(-7), or more explicitly, 0.000097%.

Now, CCP tells me this is normal. I say that 0.000097% likelihood is pseudo zero in terms of probability. It is literally 1 in a million.
To put it another way: If I did a million batches of 45 attempts each, only roughly one of these batches should result in only one success, assuming 27% chance of success and perfect randomness. Since no RNG is perfectly random, there is going to be bias in the system, but this is just ridiculous.

So, who's right? Is this "normal" or is the system broken?

(The funny thing is, before this swathe of fails, I had a fairly normal distribution of fails and successes.)

look on the bright side. you just took 44 failures off the table. Statistically for every run of bad luck you should get a run of good luck to even it out.

So in theory if say it takes a batch of 1000 to consistently hit your 27% your remaining 955 runs will have a higher chance of success as you have 44 less failures in the 1000 run batch to worry about.

in a large enough sample size the odds will always even out.