Yeah, if you win 50% of your games it means the matchmaker is working perfectly. People really have a lot of trouble understanding that.

Also, to improve, you probably have to lose a bunch of games while you're unlocking that new knowledge. The toxicity of teammates kind of steers people away from that. Thus people get stuck at where they place and never go up or down significantly.

I’m confused as to what folks think the alternative is.

Winning is a zero-sum game. If they target something higher than 50%, there would have to be a reservoir of players willing to take less than 50%…

It's not hard to come up with designs where you effectively cycle types of queues to where the end result is 50/50, but the pathway to get there is psychologically manipulative(win streaks/loss streaks/etc...).

Now, winning a single game of LoL is zero-sum, but you can't say that the ratings themselves are. Without knowing what the actual system is doing, we can't assume that players are losing/winning the same number of ranking points in a game.

Ranking should be more or less stable across even a small number of games unless your skill level actually changes.

Trying to draw parallels with singleplayer content where you can progress regardless of actually getting better is a lost cause.

Unless of course if a team full of me would have a 70% winrate, and the system is compensating (because hidden ELO) by sticking me with teammates that each have 45% winrates.

It still averages out to 50% winrate. Just because you can force a point of convergence does not mean it is the correct point of convergence.

Yeah, I definitely feel this variance in matchmaking. play games with my friends every Saturday night and 8 hours in after 5 beers, I doubt our MMR is quite as high as it was when we started the session. (The first game probably isn't great either!) But the matchmaker doesn't really know these subtleties, so sometimes the enemies get an easier than expected game. So it goes.

The competitive ladder climbing meta is really about recognizing when you shouldn't be playing and not playing then. Interesting angle to optimize.

Yeah, if I want to climb a ladder I have to play first thing in the morning (with physical exercise as well as warmup games), and make sure I quit at the right time.

I don't think the system should even care for these externalities because they will eventually balance out across a player base and the net effect should be zero(everyone will eventually play against a team with a drunk person on it). But it creates a prolonged cycle and general frustration amongst the player base.

Eventually is the key word. What eventually looks like to the player could be 10 matches, or 1000 matches, depending on how well the ELO system is implemented.

Achieving an equilibrium is step 1. Allowing for upward mobility is step 2. Enabling that upward mobility to occur (correctly) over fewer and fewer games is step 3.

Alternatively, you could also skip step 3, and profit off of smurfing.