Do they pretty much just pick the first 10 people that want to play and put them together?

It's a joke that this nonsense is supposed to be some kind of fair system.

Teams I just placed with:

My team:
Level 26
Level 23
Level 22
Level 21
Level 13

Their team:
Level 30
Level 30
Level 27
Level 26
Level 25

*@$^(@%&(!*@#%&(*!@#^&(@*#^!(@*#^&(!@#&(*#^

I love this game, and I want badly to enjoy it. This $&*@# ruins my entire night, though.

Guess who won? ...

(*@#&(*^)!@$^)*$

i had a game with my friends we were:
lv 30 (vlad)
lv 28 (garen)
lv 19 (alistar)
lv 24 (malzahar)
lv 26 (ashe)

against
lvl 30 alistar
lvl 30 ezreal
lvl 30 nasus
lvl 26 katarina
lvl 29 lux

we were something like 23-59 no turrets 1 inh down and we won on a lucky shot thanks to the new minions ! yay for the new minions!!!, i was backdooring while the other team decided to end the game with baron and all mid, and suddenly when they were killing our last nexus turret, our ashe killed kat lux and ezreal, and then they all targeted nasus and i killed with my ultimate a running alistar and by that time the minnions killed the tower on bot and the inhibitor in bot, and we managed to end it before they revive
we almost surrendered three times, but was funny to go 1v3 (we were the 3) and being killed by nasus alone XD

It always makes me giggle when I queue with my level 11 friend.

...makes me kind of sad when she carries, though. She went 8/3/8 last game as Swain. And she's completely new to LoL. Whatever.

I feel your pain mentioned this in reporting players by announcments

One match:

My team
L29 (me then)
L30
L9
L10
L13

Enermy team
L30 x 4
L26

I'm sorry but this is just messed up. I 1st thought good grief these level 30's suck then
saw their levels at the end
Please Riot can you do something about this as this type of thing has happened to me a few times

I ounce win a match with no tower loss and my friend Caitlyn is a pro =D and i ounce got 20 kills with WW and about 5 dealths

i support this message. the matchmaking needs a serious fix. even in the games wehre levels are similar (mostly lvl 30s) the personal wins are not even close to fair. i get some games where my team combined has about 500 wins, and the enemy team has several players that each have about 500 wins. its not always this bad, but the enemy often has more than three times our combined wins.

whenever i say something at the end of the game, the enemy response is always "wins dont make a difference". yes, yes, they do. a hockey team with more than twice as many wins as another is going to win more than they lose.

and its not like im some fantastic player either, deserving to go up against really talented opponents. im better than most people on my own team, but thats probably just because i get paired with absolute morons.

I see these threads SO often. Has Riot ever responded to them?

Eh, only thing they'd have an advantage over you is runes and masteries which both have pretty small impacts. It's not that big of a deal.

I believe OP's first sentence is correct- although being level 30 really isn't that much of an advantage. I play with tons of people with 500-1000 wins I'd swear weren't even level 30 during the match.

Usually playing will all 30's you find the same person running into a 1v4 thinking "oh i totally can take all 4 of them" or they have no map awareness, and then at the end screen, you look and see 800 wins and die of an aneurysm.