The majority of the playerbase are bad at the game. They’ll insist that they themselves are good, but then assert it’s their allies, the system, and any number of anything else that they can fault. Since they are convinced they are ‘good’ and are doing the ‘right play’, they stop looking to improve, don’t see their actions as mistakes and don’t learn from any of their games to do better the next time around.
In the same way, you are convinced that you have ‘proof’ and it’s someone else’s fault that things are ‘weird’ and yet, after years of forced 50% topics, you haven’t read any of those, repeat much of the same thing, and have convinced yourself to remain ignorant.
- Games are not “random”.
“Random” is a fluff-word, a cushion that people use to indicate they don’t know how something works, and will complain if they don’t get what they want. Computers aren’t ‘random’ and have math to generate probable outcomes to appear ‘random’. MMR – matchmaking rating – is more math that the game uses based on projections of probability. If matches have already been found (averaged mmr across teams) then it’s more likely to keep making that match provided those same samples persist on queueing because the math already works out.
- Free will exists.
While people tend to fall into ruts, patterns of repeated behavior, they have the capacity to do better, or worse, then the generalized expectations of their performance. Most matching complaints for games that argue something is ‘forced’ have effectively forgotten that there are other people behind those monikers despite how ‘robotic’ and complacent they may act. Many don’t care, or are convinced they’re doing the ‘right’ thing in how they play (it gets results) much the same way you’re convinced of your ‘proof’ despite not having actually posted any semblance of the variety of ways something is ‘proven’ with evidence, math, or reasoning.
- To an outside viewer, your conduct is the same as what you’re complaining about
In the mastery loop of improving at something, your actions aren’t that far removed from the other things you’re trying to complain about, so it doesn’t seem uncharacteristic or ‘forced’ that you keep encountering the same things, and not improved from it. Afterall, it the ‘other’ people who don’t know, don’t play right, and it’s the fault of something ‘weird’ that it loops the same way.
QM is pronounced of particular patterns because the matching is just a sorting system that ends up with a lot of more things than the fantasized equal distribution people expect from something they think is supposed to be ‘random’. (ranked is too, but with a few adjustments) The game isn’t selecting the heroes, or playing the game for all the things it matches, so the impact of complaint largely boils down to people assuming human-like qualities (anthropomorphism) for something that doesn’t have any. However, so long as they have something to blame, then they can forego introspection, learning, and improvement because their efforts are already spent.
Matching in the game is mostly math. While the system may evaluate people to a particular “skill” (a number that indicates the probability to ‘win’ contrasted against other numbers) people generally do not play to the expectations of that number. If a player is on a healer, they’re not as likely to be as impactful as a the mmr of equal weight placed on an assassin, or even tank since healers tend to offer a cushion for players making mistakes (healing damage) they tend to not deal the damage needed to clear waves, take camps, demolish structures, win objectives, and ultimately destroy the core.
So in the ‘random’ environment of the game, some roles are more prone to contributing to others independent of the allies around them. Conversely, some players are better able to get cooperation from those they’re playing with and collectively cause everyone on that side to perform better than they would otherwise.
Those are ‘random’ elements of the game that are consequences of free-will that frustrate most projections on who is going to ‘win’ because, surprise-surprise, the game doesn’t actually know if a player is a do-nothing ‘feeder’, the afk-split push that won the game, that player that face-checked a bush and tipped the balance of the match, or the one who stole a lategame boss and turned a loss into a win.
When people win a series of games, they tend to increase the position of their mmr score, but not really affect the average being matched. After a lose streak, you might be the lowest matched player in a game averaging 1800 mmr, win some games, and then be the top mmr in that same average. That means you’ll have ‘worse allies’ compared to where you were a few games ago, and now you have the math-based expectations to do more than what you did a few games ago, but may still be on the same hero and be more reliant on the performances of others, than of your own contribution.
That’s part of why the game even has a ‘meta’ of particular heroes seeing more play, or more success, than others: they do certain things better than others to manipulate some of the math that goes on with the matchmaking; it’s a system of predictions that does predictable things predictably. But despite all that stuff being known, a large-enough number of players keep on refusing to look into this stuff, and then complain that certain things loop when they keep on doing much of the same as everyone else they’re matched against.
So long as people are convinced they have their ‘proof’, they aren’t going to act against that, and then it becomes predictable that the same variables produce the same outcomes over and over again.