It doesn’t matter if you’re bad at the game on a team with good synergy or vice versa, the game outcome depends almost entirely on wether your team is working well together or not.
Putting the arbitrary skill ranks in the game aside for a second, skill is indeed a factor, sure, but it has diminished returns in a game where the most important determinant of victory is cooperation.
So, yes, in that regard the matchmaker is rigged, because it knows who you will play well with, those games that really click right off the bat, and it knows damn well that it’s putting you in a losing game with teammates that you won’t get along with*.
Sometimes it will put you in a game where it’s neck and neck, it’s a coin toss, and those are the best, because even if you lose, you felt like you did something, you felt accomplished for your effort.
So the matchmaker is not skill-based, it’s cooperation-based. And that’s something nobody has control over, because even if 5 people on team A are playing together, but on team B there are 6, chances are that team B will win no matter how good the other players are, granted they are of the same skill level.
And that’s something no amount of counter-picking, strategizing, or voice comms can compensate for.
I’m not even mad that the matchmaker is actively trying to keep you at 50% WR, but rather that the number of games that are damn close to those odds are hilariously few, and you are stuck in mostly snowball games for either side.
And I’m speaking from a position of someone who has been in gold for almost the entirety of their OW career. Had I been a GM smurfing through the ladder , sure, I would have been able to climb out just out of sheer superiority in every aspect like gamesense, awareness, mechanics, reaction time, etc.
But this is something that the majority of the playerbase has been dealing with almost universally, which is making the experience of the game bitter and unrewarding for many players. And disregarding it, or chalking it up to a lack of skill, is completely superficial and lacking understanding.
I know where my strenghts lie and I know my weaknesses and I’ve come to terms with my rank in the game after so many years and yet I can sense when the matchmaker is working for or against me.
*This now-notorious thread explains it in more detail, but I felt like it needed to be said, in light of all the gaslighters telling you that you suck and need to git gud. Yes, you do, but that’s just half of it.