The ‘most important’ thing isn’t a “50% winrate”, the ‘most important’ thing is a low queue time. Back when the game had active developers, the retention aspect that affected the game enough that they change all other things around it, is how long players are willing to wait for a game.
Despite some claiming they’re willing to wait, or impose that others should wait, the numbers that were indicated that enough of the players care more about lower wait times (reliable queue prediction) than anything else.
That’s why some of the most dramatic changes to the game (in speed and intensity) have been for keeping queues low.
When people fixate on the “50%” they’re lying to themselves on what makes a “Fair Game”. However, players don’t actually mean they want a “fair game”, and they constantly lie about that because they create incongruities that they fault on others. “Fair” is just a magic word people use without thinking around what they ‘mean’ with it.
So, what games typically have is players fixating on easy qualities to complain about, and use that to extend the gripe to something else. People will often gripe about diamond/bronze/rainbow/whatever matching in QM… but there’s no indication of MMR in QM. They tend to either assume what they think is the case, or they go fishing for stats to suit their complaint.
OP claims to have “55% solo winrate” but the game doesn’t have “solo queue” so that’s possibly a made-up number; other players here are assuming OP looked at their profile and posted their “overall winrate” for filtered modes. When OP complains about other players, if they looked up a player, then they may have ‘filtered’ for a specific hero, a specific mode, or whatever other adjustment that allows them to get the ‘worst’ disparity of the stats they can to fuel the complaint. They have imposed ‘double-standards’ and fault something else because they want to vent their frustrations, especially if it allows them to fault anything else they don’t have to change about themselves.
Yes, in the ‘death spiral’ of the game (low player base makes matching bad, and bad matching chases off players that further reduce the available pool) matching is going to have more outliers, but it’s also going to have ‘reasons’ for making the match.
Those ‘reasons’ aren’t the conspiracies that get commonly posted around here, and then regurgitated by chronic complainers looking to complain.
Most people chalk it up to easy complaints to vent, and then only look for things to fuel that complain because it becomes “obvious” for low-effort observations to see what they already expect to see.
Matching tries to make a “fair” match – based on number predictions – but “free will” does more to determine match quality; matching is ‘bad’ because players are bad. Players are bad because they fall into ruts of complaint cycles, think ‘protesting’ blizzard games by throwing matches will magically prove something, and impose a bunch of other superstitions and contradictory aspects because they magically believe “someone” will actually revolve the universe around them so they don’t have to change anything themselves.
But rather than notice any of that, a person will look at the ‘best’ of one end, the ‘worst’ of another, and fault the contradiction they just imposed on someone else because that’s the ‘reward’ mechanisms they taught themselves to use.