I understand what you are saying humblepie. You are entitled to your opinion and your hypothesis. My only question, which I am really curious on, is what rank are you, when you do play ranked? Or I guess a better way to word it would be, what is your highest rank achieved in standard?
Highest I gone to was rank 7 I think when I once tried to grind it out over a weekend and got a bit lucky. 12 is my highest win in arena. U don't play ranked as much, but when I pull up the quest log it show 3922 wins in ranked. Only 254 arena wins since arena pissed me off even worse and I barely do that. I usually play about 10 times as much casual as I do ranked. Funny thing with all those ranked wins is that I have yet to have any of my decks reach the 500 "golden" border since I do try to mix up the deck I am playing to the meta I am playing again when I try to gain a bit of rank. As I said previously though, I haven't seriously tried ranking up in forever. I just get my 15 and I'm done.
Oh the other reason for my hypothesis is because of win/loss ratio based on time of day. Why would that factor?
If I play during 5pm central to 9pm central I tend to have a more balance or favorable win/loss ratio. If I play outside those times I almost always lose to stupid mana curve draw problems that the game screws me and favors my opponents. Why would this matter and fit into my hypothesis? Those that don't pay to play like me tend to play during prime time. I get matched up against those players during those hours and the opponent and I would have "equal" weighting according to my theory. When I play outside those times, I tend to play against those that have spent money despite playing against basically the same decks no matter the time of day. Let me break it down.
If during prime time I play my deck A, and play against netdecks A (like mine), B, and C I have about a 50% win ratio during prime time hours. I get an occasional good and bad curve mana draw. So does my opponents.
When I play at random times outside prime times, like say 3 in the morning because I woke up and couldn't go back to bed, I play against the same net decks A, B, and C in the above example. Difference is, no matter how many games I play I almost always get this shittiest mana curve draw and the person I play against gets damn near optimal draw every time for that deck. Why would that happen? Those that tend to play in those hours more tend to be the "hardcore" players that have more than likely paid to be playing.
Trust me, the conclusion I came to took as much data points as I could figure out from myself and others. The above scenario isn't just my figures, but from others as well. I have real life friends and co-workers that play. Some of them have paid money, and some of them haven't paid anything like me. Those like me which have played long enough and haven't paid notice the same thing I notice. Especially in off-time hours. Those that have paid have the opposite effect happen with them. It wasn't actually my hypothesis in the first place, but a co-worker who noticed it first. Then we did what sampling we could. Most of which was done using deck-tracker software to help with the sampling. Again I state that it is a very small sample size with limited players, about me and 3 others. It was data for about a week's worth of playing so about 100 or less games per person so just under 400 games if I remember. When were trying to figure out why some of us had rotten luck, me and one other guy, and the other 2 didn't have the same rotten luck, that was the conclusion we came to.
Again, if Blizzard released all their captured meta data this would be a breeze to figure out. But they don't. I can't figure out one good reason why Blizzard wouldn't release those stats either.