Recently I've noticed when I Q up for a normal draft pick I'm going against or have on my team plat/ low diamond players. I'm fairly new to the game (couple months old). And I'm curious to why there is such a big gap in the Q system. It doesn't happen all the time but it has become extremely frequent. Is it because of the limited people who are Qing up? or is there another reason??
Really depends.
I assume you mean normal draft.
Basically what happens is that Diamond/plat players are queuing with friends who are silver/gold/bronze, so their mmr gets averaged and they play against opponents of that approximate average. However in practice what usually happens is that your team will often either have higher than average teammates or you will have a diamond/plat player of your own. If it was a higher diamond player, you could have 2 plats, mid gold, etc.
Essentially the reason that normal matchmaking is so awful is the same reason that dynamic queue is bad and that ranked restrictions were introduced in the first place; Diamond players used to be able to duo queue with Bronze players for example, and carry them extremely hard. MMR penalties helped in some of the less severe cases (G1 and s5 for example) but often times the Diamond player would just take total control of the game and make it rather unfun to play.
The only reason that normals aren't nearly as bad is that normal games don't matter after you're done with the game, it has no real impact what so ever so you are free to play stupid shit that you never would have done otherwise. Like playing trundle adc etc. Players also tend to play things they have little experience on in normals so they can practice them for ranked.
But yes, it is not unusual at all to play against players who have much higher ratings than you in normals, in part due to premades, also in part because normal mmr is separate from ranked mmr, and players who are high elo tend to not play normals as often.
