Recently, the authors of the sensational Dispatch admitted that the probability of completing a task in their game does not work very honestly. They followed the example of Firaxis, the creators of XCOM.
During the GDC conference, the developers explained that the game secretly adjusts the probabilities:
We knew there were tools to mitigate frustrating situations, like missing a 99 percent chance to hit. As any avid XCOM fan knows, one of the tricks Firaxis implemented was to secretly tweak the numbers ["under the hood of the game"] to make things seem fair, even if they weren't really. These guys are smart, so we decided to do the same.
After testing, the authors of Dispatch settled on the following rule: any action with a success chance above 76% is guaranteed to be successful. But this bonus has a limited effect:
After a player benefited from this bonus three times in a row, we disabled the automatic win and returned the real probabilities. As soon as the player lost with a chance above 76%, we reactivated three automatic "Successes" to ensure that he would not have a series of failures and would not complain that the game was unfair.