Well you are posting graphs and you want to understand the graphs but you do not want statistics? The graphs are statistics.
Here’s some basic overview of how match making works:
the page also contains links to peer reviewed articles and whitepapers on the subject.
The primary issue here is that you have some limitations on how effective this can be:
- There aren’t enough players around to accurate gouge your ELO. You may be 900 ELO by the system, but in fact your true performance might be higher or lower than that. The reason is because in team games you need to play 50+ (IIRC) games with different people in order to get a baseline of that skill.
- There aren’t enough players to give you a balanced team in a reasonable amount of time. In reality, those systems are time boxed, so if they exceed some time thresholds, they will simply lower the the restrictions to find you a match.
- There are huge variations between weekends and week time. You can even observe this is games with 100k+ players, the weekend is generally a time with fast queues but very poor results, because the weekend warriors play less and their ELO is less accurate.
What you are seeing in the graphs is a combination of these factors: everyone’s ELO is a bit out of place cause there aren’t enough players to figure out (you would need around 300 players to get the ELO of a single player in 3v3 setup). Then there aren’t enough players around to satisfy everyone, so it just matches with whatever is around, so you end up with these graphs.
Remember, in team games, while it is theoretically possible to accurately get the ELO of a single player, you need a lot of players to mix and match that one player. This means that even games like call of duty or starcraft 2 have a hard time providing balanced games through ELO alone on large team based modes. This is why ELO is generally a bad argument against players with less knowledge of the game which is why I am trying to avoid (using it against you was one of the rare cases because you simply didn’t want to understand).
This is why high ranking people or people who actually care about skill will usually do lobbies and do their thing there through casual rank. I suggest you do the same, if you want quality matches. I know there’s more overhead but it is what it is.
TLDR: the quality of your match making depends on others. Nothing you or the system can do about it, it is a hard limit.
