I spent some time analyzing this when playing WoW. The strongest correlation is with the "goal" aspect of the players.
Imagine that baseball games were played using a non-discriminatory matchmaking service. So start of the "Dodgers vs Giants" game there would be a pause and then 25 "players" would materialize. Some of them would be athletes in their 20s with strong skills, some would be 40+ year old veterans who have good skills but aren't in shape, some would be 10 year old little leaguers who are very knowledgeable but inexperienced and out of shape, and some would be people who just randomly picked "play baseball" as their selected activity, not really knowing even what the rules of the game were. Then there is a "manager" who has to create a starting lineup, assign positions, and win the pennant.
Extremely frustrating.
Blizzard was working on "fixing" this by segregating selection of players into "twinks" and "non-twinks", "experienced" vs "non-experienced" and "hardcore" vs "casual" which helped but it still made for a crappy experience a lot of the time.
Dota 2 has fantastic matchmaking, so it avoids the problem of total newbies playing with experienced players. Because there are over 100 different heroes to choose from, sometimes you end up with people who are very experienced at the game but completely new to their heroes though, which can be frustrating for them.
How the hell does it end up 50% wins all the time? It frustrates me to no end that, no matter how good I get, DOTA can still make sure I only win half the games.
Also, I realized that I feel around ten times worse when losing than how good I feel when winning, so the expected derived pleasure from the game is really really negative, so I scaled my playing down a whole lot.
>How the hell does it end up 50% wins all the time?
Because that's what the system was designed to do. If you're winning more than 50% it means that some percentage of the time, the game can't find 5 people who are better than you to put in a game. You'd have to compete at a semi-pro level to get this to happen.
I think you're vastly exaggerating the situation, especially for people who are not at the extreme low end play skill. 10 years ago this may have been the case for some games, but a lot has been done towards fixing it. Guilds in WoW allow for players to only do 25 man PvE or premade PvP with people they both know and are equally skillfull. Besides, arena is is the only PvP that's truly competitive in WoW and that has both a matchmaking system and ability to have premade teams.
Other games such as Dota 2, Starcraft 2 and League of Legends feature excellent match making. Anyone who takes these games seriously usually has a set group of people to play with, and only do public games when they have to.
You forgot the part where every time somebody drops a catch / pitches a ball / gets a strike the other team gets stronger and faster and if one player were to get struck out / get a walk the game often becomes a forgone conclusion.
That's why matchmaking in MOBA is not "non-discriminatory". LoL has elo points, HoN has MMR, Dota 2 has some hidden rating. Overall it converges to win ratio about 50% for most players.
you wouldn't believe how much effort was put to actually make LoL matchmaking reasonably correct. Game collects a lot of data points per match and it is fine tuned frequently
Imagine that baseball games were played using a non-discriminatory matchmaking service. So start of the "Dodgers vs Giants" game there would be a pause and then 25 "players" would materialize. Some of them would be athletes in their 20s with strong skills, some would be 40+ year old veterans who have good skills but aren't in shape, some would be 10 year old little leaguers who are very knowledgeable but inexperienced and out of shape, and some would be people who just randomly picked "play baseball" as their selected activity, not really knowing even what the rules of the game were. Then there is a "manager" who has to create a starting lineup, assign positions, and win the pennant.
Extremely frustrating.
Blizzard was working on "fixing" this by segregating selection of players into "twinks" and "non-twinks", "experienced" vs "non-experienced" and "hardcore" vs "casual" which helped but it still made for a crappy experience a lot of the time.