I’m not one for believing in any of this silly “forced 50%” nonsense but boy does it really feel like I get purposely stuck with a team full of potatoes for several games in a row after a long string of good games. It’s easy to see how people could feel that they are purposely being held back by the “engagement algorithm”.
I do understand why it happens, as your MMR rises it becomes harder & harder for the game to find equal allies for you.
It will sooner or later be forced to put “potatoes” on your team to get a match going at all in a reasonable timeframe. If you look at heroesprofile, it is perfectly normal for a 2400 rated player to get only 1800-2000 allies. Or a 2900 rated player to get allies who are 2200-2400.
There is no malicious design involved, the game in general doesn’t have many high winrate or high MMR players. As you win several games in a row and increase your MMR, you will also eventually be forced to play with lower skilled allies (sooner or later).
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I’ve never actually thought of it that way. It actually makes sense.
Then what happened to the players from the earlier ranks that were better? Its not like suddenly gold 2,3,4,5 and silver 1 and 2 are empty as soon as you reach gold 1.
And not just that, if the enemy team gets 4 of those gold 2 and 3 players. why wasnt 1 of those added to your team?
If 2 or 3 players on a team are clearly better than the rest, they still decide the game mostly. The potatoes are just food in that case. And a 2v3 is always better than a 1v4 (where now it sometimes seems to be a 1v5 which means a balanced 3v3 would have done fine).
Potatoes add a counter productive part to a team, and its also extremely important to balance that out. If 1 team can feed on such potato, and the other cant, its an unbalanced game. Thats also why AFK’s and feeders are a problem, as they generaly only exist on 1 side. If both team had one, the game would further on still mostly go fine.
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yeah but it’s not even like the other teams is performing better because they have more “equally matched” players in it. They are just doing the normal thing while my teammates are behaving like AI and worse. 
Sure, but it’s not only MMR. It’s also how the MM chooses players. I get one-sided matches all the time because I’ll be the only front-line on a team of nothing but single-target assassins. While the other team gets three wave-clear capable players, say Sam and Sylv (get this one often) and Imperious or Sonya. Sonya is definitely a bruiser but Imperious can tank better than several of the actual “tanks”. Every part of the macro game is hard-countered in that regard, even before we consider trolls, potatoes, or afkers. Especially on the two-lane maps, team composition is often more crucial than one 2500 player against a team of less than 700s, but add that crapshoot together and there are games that are clearly lost in the first 2 minutes with no hope of a counter play. And this happens, easily, 6 games in a row on a regular basis. Sometimes, you’re just on the side that stomps the fun for that streak and sometimes you just lose out of hand.
There’s a difference between MMR and player skill though.
One minute your teammates are decent. The next you get the guy who dies over and over writing “No help”
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It’s forced. Could not be clearer. Win 5 matches and then suddenly you have players in your team that seem to be the first day on this planet and have to figure out how to breathe.