So i have been playing Dota 2 for a while now (290 hours, 194 games) and i have noticed some weirdness with the unranked matchmaking. About two months ago i started getting way more wins than losses. I thought it was great and that i was getting better at the game. But then suddenly i started loosing, A LOT. There didn't see to be any rhyme or reason to it. It got to the point where i only seemed to be winning one out of every five games i was playing.

That was when i started looking at the profiles of the people I was getting grouped with. Almost none of them had played enough games for their profile to have any information in it. It seemed like i was getting grouped with new players. Now i'm sure i have heard/seen/read something in the past about the Dota 2 matchmaking trying to keep your win/loss ratio at about 50%. Is this true? or am i just having a really bad run?

It has reached the point where I am almost convinced that something is broken with it.

Please, seasoned Dota players, Your words of wisdom are needed!

Basically you are just hitting a dry spell. Right now I had a 10 game loss streak, then two wins and now I'm in a 5 game loss streak. It happens. It's happened quite a few times over the 1500 or so matches I've played. The game does try to match you with people around your skill level. There was an update a while ago that made it so you can't see other players stats unless they have selected "share match history" in their options. That's why you can't see info in those players profiles. Not because they haven't played enough games.

Contrary to popular belief, unranked still uses an MMR to match players. It's not the same MMR that you use in ranked and it's hidden, but it's always been how dota matches players. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten into fights during games because someone think they are so much better than me and I "must be at 1k MMR" and "why do I always get matched with low tier players" and I'm like "Dude... we have to be at a similar MMR to be playing together. You do realize this, right?" And they are adamant that MMR is only for ranked and unranked is COMPLETELY RANDOM which would make NO SENSE.

Sorry for the rant there. Anyway, Dota 2 doesn't FORCE a 50% win rate. It's just how it ends up most of the time with the way MMR works. You win, you go up in MMR. You play against people that are better and you lose and MMR goes down. Then you start winning more again. Just kinda works out that way. It was actually proven by a player that the 50% winrate isn't forced on people. He was a ~5k MMR player who got a new account with 2k MMR. He basically got the 2k MMR account back up to 5k without much issue. Just by playing better and winning all the time.

Just stick with it for a while and I'm sure you will start pulling out those victories again. Don't take the loss streaks too hard. I know they can be disheartening. Trust me. But I think they can be good too. You don't always have to play so hard for that win. When I hit that 10th loss in a row the other day I kind of didn't care at that point. I was just playing to have fun. I was playing heroes that I'm not great at. Trying things that I wouldn't usually do. It was therapeutic. There wasn't as much stress put on me to play at my peak. I was just rolling with the losses. As long as you are having a good time, it's all good, you know?

@th3irdeye: Thanks for the info, I wasn't aware of the hide match history option.

Ill keep plugging away.