The reason gacha odds are published and still mislead

The banner states the odds plainly: 1% for the featured character. It looks scrupulously fair — nothing hidden. Yet a player who has pulled fifty times without success feels not that a rare event has stayed rare but that they are overdue, cheated, unlucky beyond reason, and pulls again. The true number is on the screen and it is still misleading them.

What everyone sees

Publishing the odds is treated as the end of the ethical question — disclosure equals informed consent, and a player who knows it is 1% cannot be misled. Disclosure fixes the number, not the mind reading it. People systematically overweight small probabilities and misjudge how independent draws accumulate, so a stated 1% is felt as a promise that success is near and past failures make it nearer, none of which the honest figure implies.

What is actually happening

Tversky and Kahneman’s cumulative prospect theory documents that people overweight small probabilities — a 1% chance is treated as if it were larger — which inflates the felt value of each pull. Barron and Erev showed that when probabilities are learned from repeated experience rather than read from a description, people misjudge them further, and the sequence of outcomes drives behaviour more than the stated rate. Between the two, a published gacha rate is doubly defeated: the number is overweighted at the outset and then overridden by the streak of misses, which the mind wrongly reads as building toward a due win.

Why it stays hidden

The deception hides inside the disclosure itself. Because the odds are shown, the operator appears fully transparent and the player appears fully informed, so any losses look like the player’s own bad luck rather than a foreseeable consequence of overweighting a small number. Since each pull is independent, the accumulating misses carry no memory, but the interface — and the mind — present them as a mounting entitlement that the next pull will settle.