In the ideal world, both teams will be roughly equal in skill (measured by Elo points) and your chances of winning/losing will be 50% and the harder/easier opponents will be in random. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to apply to Age of Empires 4 team matchmaking.
Whether it’s 2v2, 3v3, or 4v4 I noticed a pattern where the “algorithm” forces me to lose by choosing opponents having 100 or more Elo points than my random members team three times a row and then an another three easy ones (and this time my team have more Elo points). So when you’re matched with “harder” opponents, expect that the next two matches will be harder ones… which you can’t dodge to rebalance the match making because “wait more and suffer” penalty so you have no other recourse but to quit once the match starts. It feels like a waste of time to struggle and put an effort when you know that the matches will be unfair.
It’s not fun nor fair to fight opponents that are clearly better than you. Or even have two or more really weak team members. RTS’s is such a niche genre that not everyone has a friend to play with them on the same time zone. Not everyone wants to go all sweaty just to play 1v1. And then when you try custom lobbies you either get kicked out because of your level up rank or just get a mixed bag of skilled players which is more lopsided than the team match making.
I hope that the wait for ranked team matches will be worth it because as it stands, the matchmaking is plain unfun and highly discouraging. I love the changes to siege and other balance changes but the infrastructure behind the game like matchmaking is still lacking.
It’s not like Relic is a new indie studio, you guys have experienced people… but I never experienced this kind frustration with matchmaking in Starcraft 2. Maybe you guys have to hire some previous Blizzard staff or some consulting whatever.