So can someone explain to me the boogeyman that apparently is match making?

When I look at both wins and losses, I’m seeing the same things: people are almost always keeping between a 49-57% winrate no matter what. And while I definitely understand frustrations of how imbalanced winning and losing games are (massive streaks of both wins and losses, rather than random assortments of wins and losses - which is what you’d expect), I think this claim of riots match making intentionally “keeping you” at a 50% win-rate is pretty absurd. If anything, this is a product of how unstable gameplay has become and the complete absurdity of how easy it is to swing a game in one direction.

Lets really think critically about this too: how can a system “force” a 50% winrate on you? A system can’t make players play. Furthermore, a system can’t look at who is going to play which champions - let’s be honest, most players have comfort champions that they maintain higher win rates with but they don’t always play them. Why? Because playing the same champions over and over gets boring. Secondly, even if we assume the 50% winrate notion is true, you’re actually making the claim that their algorithm can predict when you’ll be matched up in hard match-ups and that the players opposing your teammate will be significantly better in that match-up. Bottom line, no algorithm alive can make players play. This is something that dumpsters any argument of having “winrates” forced on you. Trust me: predicting human behavior (execution in gameplay) is much fucking harder than running correlations and regressions (which any predicting system would run).

As I noted above, I think the frustration is real. And I don’t discredit it because i completely understand. Often times I’ll feel the same way. But then I look back on my games and I look at each one and it occurs to me that one or two plays had a huge impact on the game that just swung it completely in favor of the other team. I’ve even had comebacks where one to two plays swung it back time back in our favor, too. Bottom line: gameplay is just so damn unstable that games practically feel like coinflips. And when that happens, it’s very easy to get really nasty streaks because your impact on the game actually isn’t really there: it’s illusionary.

I think it’s important to keep our focus on the gameplay rather than the match making system, which admittedly does have some big problems in low elo with the addition of iron. But still, it’s not a system that’s forcing winrates on anyone, its just complete butt fuckery of gameplay that has very little direction in balance and it shows. And if we focus on this boogeyman match-making, we lose sight of what’s actually wrong with the game: which is the throw-a-turd-at-the-wall-and-hope-it-sticks balancing of that’s currently taking place.