People always wonder how the match making in Dota 2 are done and is it all random or done based on your stats. Well everyone at a point of their mmr carrier might has asked this question.

This project was done over an exact period of 8 months and two professional Dota players with over 6k mmr were hired. Their names will be keep anonymous for privacy issues. Both of them were give two brand new steam accounts to start from the beginning. We shared our results with a friend who is over at the moderator section for reports and issues in steam and he agreed with us.

Both player 1 and player 2 started playing at the same time and stopped playing at the end of the 8 month time period, their hours contributed in-game are exactly same as well as their levels.

The win rate of the game starts off with 50% roughly and stays that way till players hit level 27.

Both player 1 and player 2 went into level 27 with 2115 and 2174 mmr, respectively. Both of the players played in the same region.

When player 1 was level 36, his mmr was recorded at 3053 
When player 2 was level 36, his mmr was picked at 2323

Then player 1 was passing level 45 with mmr 3825 
Whereas player 2 was level 45 with mmr 2784

They both stopped at level 53 and their mmr(s) were as follows:

*Player 1- 5248
*Player 2- 3097

O my god that was a little surprising but trust me, to us it wasn't at all. Cause we knew what was going on.

Both of the players were quite equal in all the way you can imagine of except ONE.

Player 1 had 75 sets of the heroes he played with whereas player 2 had bought 0 sets.

This is exactly the way your match making is done including the amount of experienced and non-experienced players in the team.

PLAYER 1, who had bought sets from steam, had smoother matches with experienced players on his team most of the time. Only a few times he had to team up with players where no one is good enough, feeds and talks abusively the whole game compared to PLAYER 2 who, after level 27, was forced to play by the match making, with a huge number of teams where teammates who don't know what they are doing, over feeding and mostly don't know how to play their character or stay in roles.

At the end of each player's level 53, it was approximately calculated that player 1 had a 38.8% higher chance of getting a better team than player 2.

VALVe has designed the match making to benefit them one way or another. Money isn't the only thing why PLAYER 2 was put more into teams where players were lacking experience.

After crossing level 27 with mmr over 2000+, both were considered as experienced player. As PLAYER 2 didn't pay steam a cent, they put him more into teams where players need guidance and teaching, who seek to be better but are not of the standard yet or are repeating the same mistakes again. They literally want the better players, who don't pay a cent, to babysit the players who are not doing so good. In the hope that if 4 people in a team learn from the experienced PLAYER 2 and play better, in the future, they might also start buying in-game sets and items.

The probability that a non-experienced player will learn from an experienced player in a team is about 27% and that he will end up paying for an in-game item is about 11%.

So the deal is simple, either you pay up for in-game items straight or you teach other people to play better so that they gain interest in the game and buy in-game items themselves. It's a win win situation for steam. Both ways you will have to contribute and both are in cash one way or another.

They advertise with only half the line, the whole is below
“It’s free to play, not free to win.”
No matter how good you are skilled, to do better you have to buy your way through.

One ranked match example of the many similar of player 2 (12 : 1 : 1) when “level 48”