There are a lot of complaints about match-making in Live, but I mostly ignore them, and the more Live I played, the more I felt like I understood the match-making: If I win more fights, I will get progressively tougher opponents, but as I lose fights, I will get weaker opponents, with a algorithmic push to roughly even out the win/loss ratio, and drive more players ever higher in the ranks.
That was until I cracked into G4 last week. My entry to G4 has been consistently the worst matchmaking I have seen in my entire experience in Live. Almost to the point that I think it is broken for the first time. Not necessarily matchmaking as a whole, but quite possibly matchmaking at the transitions from one tier to the next. In four of my first five G4 fights, I was served up on a platter to a top 50 Live player, including the #1 ranked player, so I would win my last fight in G3, promote, and then immediately demote. Once is an anomaly, twice is a head-scratcher, but four times out five strains the bounds of statistical probability.
After the second time, I scanned the top 100 players, and my first two opponents had the two highest win ratios out of the entire list at 87% & 88%. In no reasonable match-making should a middling LA player with a 54% win ratio be matching against the winningest players in all of Live for his first fights in G4.
For the first 3-4 days, literally every time I crossed into G4 I would get over-matched, lose dreadfully, fall to G3, and then get matched with someone at the very bottom of G3, who I would decimate and promote back to G4, only to have the same thing happen to me.
Now that I have been banging on the door of G4 for a week, match-making seems mostly back to normal the last couple of days, with my opponents ranging from 4900-6000, and I managed to string together enough wins to climb to 4825, but the transition was a bumpy ride.