Should the ELO system be rethinked?

So yesterday I was playing ranked matches with a group of friends (we are all between 1700 and 1850 team game ELO) and sudenly we got to a game where we were against one of the top 10 players of the World, both in TG and 1v1. I won’t say his name, but he is one of these guys who we see play big tournments like the Hidden Cup and match up against people like TheViper and so.

At first we couldn’t believe it, we even made jokes, our ELOs are “too low” to go against him, must be only someone with the same name on steam just for the lulz. But no. We got beaten fairly easy on the game, as expected. Then we went to look for another game and guess what? The same team, with the same pro player.

So then we noticed another thing: on his party there was an unranked player. It was literally his first/second ranked game. It was all made clear: the matchmaking system makes an average ELO count and then throw them against a team with another average ELO. But this is a problem, right? I mean, a player like TheViper can team up with a smurf (and there are lots of them out there) and go all about kicking middle ELO players like us yesterday. I am not saying that TheViper would do that, just drawing up an example.

Shouldn’t AoE have an ELO system just like Counter Strike or League of Legends? One with subgroups of ELO like Bronze/Silver/Gold/Diamond/Platin/Challenger, so then Bronze players couldn’t team up with Diamond players, for example. I know the game actually has a Bronze/Silver/Gold rating but as it is now, it only serves for aestetical value.

I am not complaining about playing against such a high skilled player, it was actually an honor for me and my friends, but it made me think that the system is really broken right now and can be easily exploited by people. I am also not saying that this player had bad intentions, he was just playing with his friends.

Say if me and my 1700~1800 friends put an unranked smurf on our team, we might easily earn some free ELO or at least change our ranked win/rate.

In my opinion, this should be looked upon with care and we could even have a season system, where the ELO resets like every 6 months/year.

What you guys think?

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Team game ELOs are really inflated due to bugs that existed for the first 4 months of the game’s life, and once the bugs were fixed, the ratings were not reset.

Combine that with the fact that top players aren’t typically playing lots of team games so when they do, their TG ELO isn’t as high as it should be, and you get the issue you are describing.

ELO resets would probably make the problem worse, since high ranked players would have to climb back up to their proper ELO each reset, ruining quite a few games in the process.

I think a one-time ELO reset for the TG rating should be done assuming the scoring bugs are fixed, then the point distributions would mimic the 1v1 ladder a bit better.

I think having ELO brackets/leagues ala SC2 and other games like LoL and Dota could work, there’s a whole lot of unexplored features that these other games have pioneered that make a lot of sense for AoE2, but I don’t think our dev team has the capacity to develop and support these features, unfortunately.

Elo system works fine, if there is no error in calculation. I feel like calcution of team ELO is not correct at this moment. Ratings start getting inflated. In the end you got fair games based on ELO, but no fair games based on the actual skill. There are really players with RM 1v1 around 1000, but RM teamgames above 2.2k. That shows us how broken the system is.

I made already a thread about this issue. I hoped devs would respond. But they didnt respons.

Chess elo system is fine. Resetting the elo every “season” would only increase amounts of unfair matches which you are addressing in this tread.

In certain games you cannot team-up with unranked players after you go past a certain elo threshold.

I would like to address the gaining elo system - you should start gaining more and more elo as your win strike rises. And then if you start having negative strikes you should lose gained imbalance. In this way elo would be more dynamic and pros would start playing ranked teamgames instead of having to make them manually (unranked lobbies).

I think I made the question unclear,

The problem isn’t actually the ELO system itself, but as it is in Age of Empires now. Truly, in certain games you cannot team up with unranked players, but here you can, and I think thats the problem. The ELO reset allied with these proposed brackets (and we can even use fancy names such as Militia/Archer/Knight/Cavallier/Paladin and such), would keep the players into a certain ELO position where the season reset could work, such as is in League of Legends, for example, which I think has a very good rating system.

problem with league of legends like system is that it needs more than 52 000 active players( ranked TG in last 28 days). Also i think teamgames are now working in terms of rating as even with avarage elo all my games have been between 1700-1900 rated players which is basically same level because of inflation.

I have a lot of friends who are near me in skill but do not play as often as I do, thus our ratings are a few hundred points apart. I would simply stop playing team games if I was unable to team with them because of this.

main problem I’m seeing witht this MM, is the lack of MMR for premades. Playing 1 time every 200 matches against a pro paired teamed with a noob doesn’t bothers me. on the other hand being mismatched constantly when I play 4v4 with randoms, because my mmr moves when I play with premades, is really annoying.

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A few hundred is still close. I’m talking about a 22++ teaming up with a 12++, not a 15++ and a 17++. Yet if the discrepancy is too big you could always go to lobbies.
Thats how almost all competitive games work.

9 months later…
I totally support your idea, specially ELOs should be reset every 6 months or 1 year !
I’m middle / low ELO player (around 1400).
When I had time for, I was playing often and enjoy playing at my level.
Then, too much work and personal stuff, no more time for AoE2…
Restarting on ranked games after some months, I’m playing more like a big noob equivalent to a 1000.

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