I just received my first rewards

I need more luck
There is definitely something wrong with the forging probabilities with the 2 latest versions.
From my experience there are no changes, the same probability as last week.
I do think the probability of forging a block is a lot lower than last week due to the massively increased node count. A week ago the amount of HEAT forging was only a few million. Now we are around 11 million HEAT forging.
You're right that the total forging balance matters. I meant that the probability looks normal to me taking into account the number of forgers after the recent upgrade.
I believe forging on a
public node has a slight advantage than on a private node behind NAT like in Nxt, because a public node is connected to more peers and can propagate a generated block a few msec faster, orphaning competitor block. This should be more so in HEAT because HEAT has faster blocks and propagation speed is more important than in Nxt.