As a toplane main I get sick whenever I see people complain about the winrate of tanks

I just had yet again this tiresome discussion: someone claimed that tanks are bad right now and tried to prove it by pointing at winrates.

And it appears to be true, many tanks are hovering just around 50% with only few exceptions, some even far below that. As many people here try to argue with statistics like this I am going to adress why this argument frustrates me so much.

Let's take a look at Poppy (46% winrate) and compare her to Riven (49% winrate). Looks like Poppy is doing really badly while Riven is doing sort of fine, right? Many people would even argue that RIven is even stronger because Riven has a 9% pickrate while Poppy has only 3%.

And here is why all that is wrong: it's the winrate/games played statistic. The reason why people think that pickrate is meaningful is because they believe that it indicates that the players are casual FOTM players who do not main the champion and thus are worse. However, that thinking is fallacious as the winrate/ranked games played statistic proves.

Poppy has a better winrate than Riven regardless of the level of experience. In fact, Poppy players with 30 games on her do better than the most experienced players. That just proves what we should know intuitively: tank players are in average just have way less experience than carry players and thus should perform worse.

I believe that this has two reasons 1: autofilled players tend to pick safe tanks and toplane is prone to having autofilled players as the role got increasingly unpopular 2: people do not really tend to main tanks as flashy carries are just more attractive to binge play.

tl;dr: taking into account their experience with the champion people who play tanks perform exceptionally well. The average tank player having way less experience than the average carry player leads to missleading winrates.