Agreed! And on top of that, i don't think players even know their odds before participating, so the player is gambling without knowing his chances of either winning or losing.. That is stupid.
Even when they know the odds, people don't know what the odds mean. The X-Com series is infamous for "wonky" odds, like all the times you miss when you have a 99% chance to hit, and people think this is a bug - even though the math is all correct. So infamous that newer games now "cheat" and show lower odds than the internal model uses in hit calculations... and they "feel" more correct.
I'm not a brain doctor to explain how it works, but seems that when the gamble addict believes that is possible to win, it hardly change mind about it, no matter how many times the result go against this belief.
It's called "Gambler's fallacy", the belief that you have to win
eventually, and that your odds of winning increase after a long losing streak. The more they lose the more convinced they are a win is inevitable, because "what are the odds of losing a hundred times in a row?"
I doubt lootboxes are rigged. The "prizes" cost nothing to make and the house always wins. On the other hand lootboxes are closely monitored and on shaky legal ground as it is. There's little to gain and a lot to lose if the legislation changes.
That being said: circling back to the X-Com thing, maybe they should skew the odds the
other way with lootbox prizes, so that they "feel" more balanced. Dunno, maybe.