I would consider myself a casual player with under 160 wins and never played a ranked game (yet). But I'm curious why in normals solo queue, the teams seem so unbalanced sometimes? Case in point, I'm almost always the player with the least amount of wins in both teams. Not by a little, I mean by a factor of 3x, 4x, and I've seen add high as 9x ! People with 300, 600, 800, and even over 1000 wins.

I'm not complaining, I still consistently win (though in a loss you can guess what I'm called). Rather I'm curious on the matchmaking. I guess it works, but looks very odd sometimes.

Thanks.

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/....php?t=1976101

Have a look through the red posts in that thread. Essentially, number of wins has almost no impact on player skill - all it does is improve the system's confidence in a player's rating. Your 160 wins may not be enough to have placed you at your proper ELO, so if you feel mismatched, that's more likely the reason.

you win count really has no effect.
For normals, they also do an ELO system, however, it is hidden.

If you start seeing gold and diamond level players in your normal queues, congratulations, matchmaking has deemed you guys about the same skill level.

Additionally if your queue time is really long, for most of your games, your probably are really good.

Embrace the opportunity to play against experienced players.
Keep playing, have fun.

1000 wins or not, a player can still be the same elo as you, i have about 400 normal wins but my normal elo is about 1600 so the people i play with usually have around 1000 games+ with simialr normal game elo to myself, its not games man, the system counts how often you win to place you with similar people.

Thanks for the replies & info everyone, appreciated!

After a bit of reading & an elo calculator check, it places me around +/-1300. Average I guess, suits me fine.

1k wins. how many losses i wonder?