[2023] I have a tinfoil hat theory that Riot's matchmaking algorithm secretly passes damage buffs/debuffs to one team in certain games in an effort to nudge the game towards a desired outcome

I've been playing this game for 8 going on 9 years now and I've seen quite a bit so the following theory is just from my personal experiences. For context I'm currently P2 with a 62% winrate.

Just seems like some games one team does insane damage for no reason and some games one team just keeps barely getting away with 15 health. And there doesn't really seem to be any correlation between when this happens and how much gold each team has. Sometimes I have 230 armor and 180 mr and I'm unkillable one game and get torn through like paper in another game in basically the same situation.

Also, take into consideration what percentage of your ranked games are just complete stomps from beginning to end. It's actually a fairly large percentage right? That doesn't seem right considering matchmaking is supposed to be composing teams from a pool of players allegedly fairly equal in skill level. Yet in what seems like 30 - 40% of games, one team just gets completely decimated. The amount of stomps far exceeds the amount of close games in my experience. One team starting the game with a 10 - 15% damage buff would achieve that pretty easily.

The reason for this? Well, here's part 2 of my tinfoil hat theory. I think Riot's algorithm has "quotas" for each rank bracket that it needs to fill by the end of every season. It wants a certain percentage of players in each elo, and if this doesn't occur naturally, then the algorithm starts fudging things to nudge it in the right direction. If you're playing at a P4 level but plat is "full", welp, sorry bud but you're never getting past that plat promo, at least not this season. You're playing at a S1 level but gold needs a couple more players? Well, congratulations, you just got promoted. The reason for this is to help players who have been playing for a long time but not really improving very much. Someone who's been hardstuck silver for 3 seasons is much more likely to get that bump up to gold for example. This helps Riot keep their playerbase as many people would just move on to another game once they realize that they've hit their peak in this one.

Just my theory, do with it what you will.