Efficient crafting?

I'm sorry to say that this strategy has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of crafting. There is no artificial luck smoothing system with any rolls in the game. The success chance is exactly the same if you've just hit a very lucky or very unlucky streak. This is just how math works in general.

If you are flipping a coin a million times, you would reasonably expect to get approximately 500,000 heads and 500,000 tails. Now, let's say that you're 200,000 flips into the experiment and you have 150,000 heads and only 50,000 tails. You're somehow flipping heads at a 3:1 rate and you're surely due for some tails right? Well, even in this extreme example, with the remaining 800,000 flips, you can reasonably expect them to still end up at 1:1 and get 400,000 of each from that point on. just because you're down 100,000 tails flips at that point, it doesn't change the odds from 50% from that point onward. It's just one possible outcome of the set of flips up to that point.

You can also look at it from the other side too. If you did those first 200,000 flips enough times, one of them will eventually get to the 3:1 skewed results state. Here is a good video explaining it in 1 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfF7R8qclLE

There are tons of books written on the topic for casino games that work in a similar fashion. Just to be clear, this is different than card games because with card games you actually take possible options out of the data set with each hand so this is a different situation than counting cards in blackjack with a fixed shoe.

We actually very intentionally don't have any luck smoothing systems in the game specifically for this exact reason. We don't want people to need to sacrifice items to the system in order to increase their odds of success. It artificially skews the crafting chance based on some unintuitive tribal knowledge. If we wanted to have better odds of people succeeding in crafting, we would just increase the odds.

Source: I'm one of the people that made the system.

TL:DR Each roll is independent and you can't influence a roll but priming the system.

I literally wrote the code you are talking about. I know how it functions. If you want to keep doing this, that's fine. I just don't want someone else to come across this and think they should do it too.

This method has no impact on the outcome of crafting.

That's right. Your next roll will not have a higher chance of lower potential.

Every roll is an isolated event that has no impact on the rolls that come afterwards and are not affected by the rolls that came before.

Yea, the chance of any individual (fair) coin flip is always 50/50 regardless of what has happened before.

Edit for second question in the edit: Yup, the chance of any individual (fair) coin flip is always 50/50 regardless of what has happened before.

Yea, that's something called Confirmation Bias. Because you're hoping for a specific outcome, your brain prioritizes results that align with that outcome in your memory. Everyone does this and it's not necessarily a bad thing. If you're really interested in testing this properly then you'll need to start recording all the data from every crafting event.

I have run tests on the system with artificial sample sizes in the trillions to make sure that things like this don't happen and that the randomization is as fair as it can be. So I am quite confident when I say that sacrificing materials to dummy items is a waste of crafting materials and time.

However, if you enjoy doing it, then keep doing it. I don't want to tell you how to play the game. Just trying to have accurate information available to people who might stumble upon this in the future.