Strike Team Odds Seem Inaccurate

I don't think there is a way to remove negative traits, just retire them like you said.

That said, I don't see why you'd retire them at all since as I mentioned, you can clearly fail pretty regularly at 90% so there really isn't a great way to avoid negative traits.  I'd keep using someone at level 20 even if they have negative traits.  Why not take the kamikaze approach and send them on everything.  If they get negative traits, so be it.  

While that's disappointing to hear, I'm also glad you said it because I noticed the exact same thing.  The whole negative trait thing is weird because you really don't have control to avoid it even when you baby your character with only high success rate missions.  Dang...so it's broke.  I'm just going to say the heck with it and send them on gold and if they fail, oh well.  

Feel free to explain how a level 20 team with 5 positive traits and no negative ones fails a 90%+ mission at least twice for every 10 attempts. I mean there are only 3 missions per difficulty per day so it's not that hard to track your actual success rates. So either the displayed success rates are wrong, or there is a minimum failure rate which is not being displayed.

Agreed.  I'd love to hear an explanation from Zerfidius...I'm starting this thread in an effort to learn the truth but as hieroglyph mentioned, if it says 90%+ and you still fail more than 10% of the time, then I don't think my math is the problem.  Even with negative traits, isn't the success rate percentage supposed to take that into account?  

Admittedly, I'm replying too much to my own thread but to say that you need thousands of tests to say if it's accurate is a bit unnecessary.  Let me put it another way, the game was just released and Bioware knows there are bugs.  I've played other games like Assassin's Creed where you can send your assassins off on missions in a very similar fashion with various success rates and I never ran into this issue.  There's no question the odds aren't as high as some of them indicate.  I fail a mission every day and have 90%+ on every mission I try.  
What you say about probability is true but that said, if I had 2 fails in a row, which already happened, then where are the 20 in a row success streak as well?  I'm failing at around a 35% rate for 90%+ missions.  

I think the only way is to retire.

My first two teams I decided to make my suicide squad, they just die repeatedly attempting gold, but still earn me an occasional success.  I figure grinding gold missions is better then nothing.  My next pair of teams I am slowly working through only bronze and silver missions until they are at a high level and have some equipment.  I want these new teams to have a high success rate on gold.  After which point, I will retire the suicide squad, and begin two more teams for bronze and silver.

As for the RNG.  I have won some missions with a 10% chance of success, and lost some with a 90% chance of success.  RNG... it is what it is. 

My goal is to equip them one day so odds are 100%.

Pretty sure it isn't possible.  There's either a hard cap of chance of success, or a diminishing rate of returns on bonuses that functionally creates a cap.   I've yet to see anything over 94/95, no matter how favorable the traits are for the team. 

Other people are doing a good job explaining what I was getting at.

But I've just got to jump in here and point out that your explanation of randomness as applied to real world vs an artificial scenario is not correct.

Probabilities applied to real-world models are more likely to be incorrect because they are based on assumptions and it's very hard to get all of the assumptions correct in a real-world model.

Even a coin flip is probably going to end up more on heads or tails over the long haul depending on the coin you use because of the weight of the coin and the distribution of the weight.

A probability generated for an artificial model living entirely within a computer is much more likely to end up correct despite the supposed problems with random number generators because all of the variables have been applied to the probability and incorporated into the estimate in this case the chance of success of the mission) get at the end.

The exception to this is if the person generating the model is lying to you or has an made a significant error which is certainly possible but unlikely.

RNG isn't a complicated concept.

Do you know how many 20% golds I've succeeded in?

aaaaand this is why i don't start strike missions when i have 5 percent chance of success lel