In the heat of the moment, it can often feel like the game is rigged or the lobby balancing keeps giving you the worst players to force undeserved losses, but do the numbers actually support this? Let's find out. Over my last 100 Iron Banner matches played, I had a 2.39 kd and consistently focused on playing the objective. I am by no means the absolute best player in the game, but I feel like that level of performance should be at least somewhat reflected in my win rate. The reality? 38% win rate, including massive loss streaks (an 8-streak and two separate 9-streaks) compared to my only win streaks above 2 were one single 4-streak and two 3-streaks. Also, there were also many games where my friend and I were the only ones on our team with a positive kd and the rest of our team went negative. This would be fine if it were balanced out by games where we were carried by our team instead but this wasn't really the case. Of my 38 wins, 29 of them (76%) I was over a 2 kd and even on the remaining 9 games I was still positive on all of them, around 1.3-1.8 generally. And again, I want to stress that, unlike in regular quickplay, in IB I am mainly focusing on objective as I just need wins to gild the seal and get more rep. I'd have no problem losing most games in qp if I was ignoring obj but that's not the case here. In light of this, it's really hard not to feel like Bungie has a hand on the scale in terms of forcing losses, and as someone who enjoys pvp and is at least above average in terms of skill it really starts to feel punishing to be constantly put into unwinnable games. All I'm saying is maybe we could consider relaxing the lobby balancing a bit and leaning more into players earning their outcomes a bit more.