I think this is just RNG at work.
Let’s put this into perspective with some objective numbers.
Let’s assume we have 10,000 players hunting for 24 hours today, and during this period, they’ve each slain 100 monsters and all of them are able to drop driftstones.
That’s 1,000,000 chances of dropping a driftstone each.
I have no observed drop rate of the drift stones, but I feel like it’s about as rare as an R5, and I know the observed drop rate for R5 is about 4% per Basic Reward slot on average.
Suppose that the 4% drop rate holds true for the 1,000,000 hunts, that means 40,000 must have dropped in all that 1,000,000 hunts, or on average of 4 per hunter (since each has slain 100 monsters).
However, this is not the case in actual. All 10,000 players will not get 4 driftstones each for the 100 monsters they have slain.
You must have seen cases where a hunter got like 10 driftstones over 40 hunts, and that’s a drop rate of 25% for that hunter. Very fortunate.
But, let’s say if 10% of the hunters got very lucky and they had their fill of 4 driftstones within their first 16 hunts (the same rate as 10 driftstones over 40 hunts in the “very lucky” scenario above), and assume that they stop hunting at that point, and the rest of the hunters carry on to hunt more monsters to fulfil that quota of 1,000,000 monsters slain, the remaining 90% of the hunters will now have to take over the “no-drop” hunts from the 10% very lucky hunters.
10% of 10,000 = 1,000, times 16 = 16,000 monsters hunted by the very lucky hunters and they stopped.
1,000,000 - 16,000 = 984,000 monsters to be slain by the remaining 9,000 hunters.
Assuming that the remaining monsters are slain equally by the remaining hunters, that’s 984,000 / 9,000 = ~109 to 110 per hunter.
Since the drop rate of 4% still must hold true for the 1,000,000 hunts, the drop rate would look like 4/110 = ~3.6% to these remaining 9,000 hunters, even though it is still 4% across all 1,000,000 hunts.
However, the game does not have pity rolls. Your 4 drops will not come in equal spacing across the 110 hunts. It can come all at the beginning, peppered throughout the 110 hunts, or all come at the last 107th to 110th hunt.
You’re at 70 now. If the scenario were actual numbers, then you’re simply not hunting enough.
This is the same thing for all the RNG drops. It’s just how it is.
RNG doesn’t care what you have done before or how much effort you have put in, or whether you have hunted much more than usual. If it hits, it hits. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
You have no choice but to continue rolling.
To put it into perspective, there are players who get R6 on a daily basis, and there are players who have not gotten a single R6 for 3 months even though they’ve hunted a similar number of monsters as those who get R6 on a daily basis. This is why.
We all have the same fair chance, but it doesn’t mean the outcome will be equal for everyone.