Strike missions are blatantly rigged

I've got some bad news for you. VladImpalerIII in the big Strike Teams thread just posted a team today with 11 negative traits.

Honestly, multiple of us have run the numbers in that big thread, and so far equipment for Strike Teams is absolutely not worth it.  Though that may have changed today.  Far more missions appeared today than is normal.  Maybe it's a bug from the patch, but if it's the new normal, then some of the equipment might be worth it now.  The problem before was that the payoff time for equipment was way, way, way too long.  Like, 2+ months in order for the high tier equipment to pay for itself (based on the number of extra missions you would succeed with the equipment, factoring in that you can retry failed missions, mission success chance is capped at about 94 percent, so equipment is only useful for Golds and low level teams).  Negative traits do hurt Gold chances, but they don't appear to have much if any effect on Bronze/Silver chances once you have a level 20 team, so there's not even a reason to disband them as long as you have extra missions for them to run. 

That's exactly what traits are for.  There are global positive traits that are +5 to success rate, and then there are condition specific traits that are +10 or -10 for that condition, so they only matter if that condition is present. 

Buuuuuuut, traits appear to have diminishing returns after 70 percent (like a +5 trait will only give you a 74 percent chance if you start with a 70 percent), and the diminishing return appears to be worse the higher the base success chance.

Okay, I see what you're saying.  Yeah, once you're level 20, nothing really seems to matter for success rate on Bronze/Silver.  My bad team with 5 negative traits still has a 91 percent chance on Silver even if 2 of the negative traits are in play.  On Gold, the best success rate I've seen has been...66 percent, I think.  I suspect even with +20 equipment (which is condition specific), the best you could get for a Gold would be around an 80 percent with the diminishing returns. 

I only ever send my teams on bronze and silver and out of must be a good ~50 missions (average at least 3 a day over the last 2 weeks or so) I can only recall 3, maybe 4 failures.

Must be on a lucky streak but most of the time they succeed.

lolequipment

I hope into pretty much every mission regardless of the probability of success and have a great success rate. Only one negative trait on both teams so far too.