There are some bad players but typically there are 5 decent players in 1 game around 1000 - 1500 1v1 elo range (3v3s, 4v4s were too laggy). And if you have a good game, you can basically be worth 2 players.
Its perfect for practicing unit comps, new civs, tower rushing, economy management, premill rushes etc.
It was pain to find unranked games around this rating with basically every lobby being “noobs only” and/or black forest.
Now I am not saying Ranked wasn’t bad for trying out new stuff but theres just that something about going full burmese/aztec monks or ballista elephants without losing mmr.
The queue times seem to be max 7 minutes depending on timezone.
How is matchmaking even organized? I’m getting really wack elo matches. Some games people have no clue how to play, I got matched with a guy with like 400 elo as a teammate and the other team had two 2k players, one higher than me onen lower than me. They could have explained how the MM system works, how it plans to balance teams because this is weird and makes no sense. If they’re gonna mm friends together they should at least face against higher elo players.
For ranked: it is based on Elo. You will face up against players with the same elo.
For Quick play: It is completely random. You can face every other player in the queue. It do not use any elo at all (afaik).
So if you want balanced games, you need to go to ranked.
My opinion about Quick play: It is trash and a waste of resources from the devs. More about my opinion:
As an opposite example, I played an interesting 1.5 hours team game yesterday using Quick Play, better than an average lobby game. Sure, there were skill level differences between the players, but in team games, that can balance each other out. It’s hit and miss, sometimes you can get a decent game and sometimes it’s very one-sided.