There are some people here who need to be reminded how ELO works.
Every player has a hidden ELO rating for each faction and mode, which is the matchmaker's assessment of how likely you are to win.
When you win a match the matchmaker increases your ELO rating. The size of the increase is dependent on the rank of your opponent.
- Beat a player at the bottom of the ladder and you'll gain barely any ELO. Beat DevM himself and you'll gain a ton of it.
- ELO adjustment when you lose follows the same pattern: if you lose to a player at the bottom of the ladder your ELO's going through the floor: if you lose to DevM your ELO won't be adjusted by much at all.
Over several matches your ELO will become more accurate and the matchmaker can more reliably achieve its goal: giving you fair matches.
The matchmaker can't tell the difference between skill and balance: a good player with a terrible faction and a bad player with an overpowered faction are the same to it. It's not working out how good you are, it's working out how likely you are to win.
Say a balance patch gone wrong buffs OKW to the point where players that used to beat Rank 400 now beats Rank 200 Soviet players. The ELO systems sees low ELO OKW players beating high ELO players and increases their ELO. Because they're now winning much more the OKW players will gain ELO (they won't gain rank as every player on OKW ladder has gained this advantage) and face progressively harder opponents until they start losing again. As a result, the Rank 200 Soviet players now get matched against Rank 600 OKW players instead.
In brief,
if your faction is underpowered the matchmaker will compensate by giving you weaker opponents.
That might be a bitter pill for some people here to swallow but it's true:
for the majority of players faction balance doesn't affect you much. If you're losing all the time it's because the matchmaker thinks you're better at that faction than you actually are and is matching you against faction/player combinations that are too strong for you.
This breaks down at the top of the ladder where there simply aren't enough players for the matchmaker to do this. That's half of the reason the game is balanced around its best players.