A kind request for an issue long overdue- TG elo. Frankly, I don’t even know why I should have to make a thread like this, why it hasn’t been made before, and why the devs didn’t act on their own.
Team games are a mess, we all know that. Ranked team games are an even bigger one. And the issues there stem mostly from who gets matched with who-
Disappointed for the developers
Ranked matchmaking regarding ELO
Solution to Smurfs/Elo ladder manipulation
Stop the Civ balance or blah blah blah, fix the ridiculous TG ranking
Now, the problem for this stems mostly from the elo system and premades being obviously much stronger than 4 people queuing up separately- from VC, to knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses, and better communication- an X from me to my friend at a specific time and location means enough to him, I don’t have to explain in chat what exactly I’m Xing, even in dark age.
A lot of the reasons TGs are not balanced right now though is because of how the elo used to work before, and the reason the TG elos are so inflated- I’d say 2k 1v1 elo corresponds to about 3k in TG.
I have played TGs since the start of DE, when netting a win gave you ~50 points, and losing a game deducted… ~10 points. Nowadays, you get 10 for a win, and lose 10 for a win, at least at the level I am at.
If I recall correctly, I got to 2.1k in about 10 games 
Or, the 10 games that are placements for your actual rating. Conversely, if I make a new account and play 10 placement games now, I am doubtful I will reach above 1300 rating, because every win gives you 10. If it’s your first games, make that 20, 25 at most.
From then on I will be much better than my allies and enemies at the given rate, and the game becomes a coin toss of whichever team gets more old “new” players, that are skilled more than their rate accounts for.
Next problem is, matchmaking calculations. In a 1v1 sense a 2.3k player playing against a 2.5k player will be… I’d say 70% chance for the 2.5k to win against the 2.3k player. The same can’t be said about 1.3k and 1.5k though. And when there aren’t enough players in the queue, we have all seen Hera get matched against a 1900 on stream, or when this happened - Can the 1v1 matching stop being that ridiculous?- a 1700 vs a 2300 or what was it?
The game obviously has some calculation of, for every minute that passes, increase the diapason of elo searched by 5%, give or take I assume. So after 5 minutes if you are 1000 elo, the game is searching for someone from 750-1250, and at that point it’s almost impossible to not find a player, in fact, such a matchup is impossible at such low rates. But if you are rated at 2500- it’s not out of the question to wait 8-10 minutes for a game, and get matched against a 2100.
How, how all of this relates to TG?
From the inflated TG rates before, and the fact people use smurfs with 95% win rates to push specific accounts further up, a team of average 3300 elo after waiting for 5 minutes, will get matched against a team with an average elo of 2400- this makes sense to the game and the code, because it assumes that those people aren’t too far apart. In practical terms though, this will never be a win for the team of 2400 due to how outskilled they are- we are talking, 2400 TG is about 1400 1v1 elo, and 3300 TG is… 2100 1v1 elo.
But the game has no choice, that’s the most even it can make the two teams, and it doesn’t see an issue doing so, because of how sparse the ratings up there are.
To put things in perspective:
To create a 1v1 match of 1000-1100 elo we need 2 players from a pool of 7000 (stats by Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition Rating Charts (aoe2.se))
Easy enough.
To create a TG match of 1000-1100 elo though we need 8 players from a pool of… 6000. Even though there are more people who play TG than 1v1 at all levels, they are a lot more spaced out, between 300 and 4000 elo. For 1v1, it’s between 300 and 2500. It’s much easier to make balanced games if the people are clumped up closer together and the disparity isn’t as big- right now, a player of a certain skill can be rated at 1500, or 2500 TG rating depending on when exactly he played his placements- and, to the ones saying, “well, can’t he just climb up?”, carrying in 4v4 is a lot harder than winning in 1v1, so not really, unless he is playing with premades.
In addition to that, we can safely assume that the devs took a note from voobly and said to themselves, "okay, let’s design the system in such a way that the highest rating achieved will be about 2.5k and people will be spread with a bell curve around 1100.
In 1v1, that worked, and it will work, because the ratings there aren’t broken-
In the TG ratings though, the ladder was never supposed to have people above 2.5k, let alone have that many players above that, some approaching the 5k mark-
Does this look like a bell curve to you? Certainly doesn’t to me, and it’s why the game gets confused so with the TG ratings.
And this is why so often we see people here complain about how bad the TG matchmaking system is and how they got matched against impossible opponents. Because when those people join their games and the people against them have a better build order and have army out 1 minute sooner and have communicated their attack, at the base of the flank it’s not 1 archer and 1 scout vs 2 archers and 1 scout, it’s 1 archer and 1 scout vs 2 archers and 4 scouts- elo differences in TGs are much more terminal than in 1v1.
The fix for all of this is simple, and quick, and easy- reset TG ratings. The 1v1s are fine. But I have seen 1200s be 1600s in TG and 1200s be 2400s in TG. It’s nonsense, I can imagine how bad the people who don’t play with premade teams have it, getting matched against either players who are too bad, or who are too good, because of the small population at a given TG elo, compared to 1v1, the issue being further exacerbated by it being virtually impossible to increase your rating at the lower levels at the moment due to how much better returning players are- but instead of getting placed at 2200, they get placed at 1400 due to the new system.
Just… please. Not only that, but it will make it much easier for everyone to schedule unranked TGs, will give us more consistent metrics for how good people are when hosting lobbies, on top of giving you devs enough time to figure out how to address premades in TGs without people uninstalling the game due to how unbalanced it is, especially for casual players.
TRUNCATE TABLE DE.Players.Ratings.TG;