Crafting Luck or Preset?

I've experienced situations that made me think I had no luck with my crafts, that it was impossible. Sometimes it happened so often that I thought I was stuck in a bug, that only that particular mod could be applied to that item, but that wasn't the case, at least that's what PoE Craft said. I also think I've encountered ritual pages that were almost identical a few times, with items that had similar properties. These situations happen a lot, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but it's always the same thing.

Randomness is one of those things that us humans really suck at grasping intuitively.

If you develop a phone app that is designed to simulate rolling a dice (40K nerds might love it!), and someone tries it and gets a 2 five times in a row, they might try reporting this as a bug. But such an outcome is as valid as any other - and if you were to put limitations in place to prevent such repetition, you would in fact be reducing the randomness - not increasing it.

Our proclivity to assuming that "random" outcomes will cycle through possible outcomes routinely is self-reinforcing; movie script writers, game designers, and countless others all think that this is either correct - or, at the very least - desirable. Often just because they know it will help others to intuitively accept the "randomness", and so it's the path of least resistance. And so movies will gravitate toward such outcomes, and many game designers will limit or prevent the streaks of bad luck that someone could experience. But all of these are inherently artificial reductions to randomness.

The crew at Grinding Gear Games have always been fans - some would say zealots - of "pure" RNG. They don't implement bad luck protection systems where crafting items will secretly be forced to offer a good outcome after X instances of bad outcomes. By the same token, some players who have never before seen a Mirror of Kalandra have two Mirrors drop for them at once. Some very new players have gotten a Mirror of Kalandra drop and promptly used it to create a second ring with life and two resists because they were new, assumed that any crafting materials that dropped could not possibly be rare, and so never even thought at the time to check whether a Mirror was particularly valuable.

It doesn't help that our brains are not wired to help us succeed - they are designed to help us survive. This leads to an unconscious bias towards remembering bad outcomes much more readily than good outcomes - because our brains think they represent some form of danger, and want to ensure we don't fall victim to the same thing again. But this bias amplifies the frequency of bad "random" outcomes we experience in our minds, while the good are silently forgotten.

...also, different outcomes aren't weighted equally - so e.g. seeing Orbs of Transmutation significantly more frequently than Mirrors of Kalandra isn't RNG going against us - it's just drop rates functioning as designed. If you posted a Ritual screenshot, we could offer opinions on whether it's just relatively more common outcomes surfacing for you, or whether something else is going on.