I have played aoe2 for a long time, one thing I noticed long time ago for team elo is that, if a person is equally skilled in Arabia and Arena, his elo playing Arena would be higher than if he plays Arabia.
In my experience this gap can be estimated to be as large as more than 200 elos. That means 1300 elo arena team is as good as 1100 arabia team on arabia. But 1300 arabia team still performs like 1300 or even more on arena. This is because the asymmetric nature of the game, boom players have difficulty handling rush, but rush players shouldn’t have too much problem booming.
A lot of people prefer arabia and ban arena and vice versa. Because there are so many players doing this, the player base are split overtime. The problem emerges when many games have been played. Equal elo arabia player is actually better than arena counterparts.
If i m not clear enough, take an example. Team 1 ban arena and favours arabia, and got to 1300 elo. Team 2 ban arabia and favours arena and got to 1300 elo. Then team 1 is actually better than team 2. This will have problems because if team 1 matches with team 2 on open maps, team 1 completely dominate. If they match on a closed map, then team 1 still have a very decent chance but the game will be more even as intended.
Some of my friends are arena only players and they get completely stomped if they get an open map and match with similar elo opponent team, then accusing opponent smurf.
This unbalance will also distort elo because player base are gradually split overtime, into an open map group and close map group, and then are still matched using the same ranked metric. Im sure many players are overrated or underrated by elo, because they are good at a certain map, and many players feel that they are smurfed on, because opponent team carries the same elo but are actually better players.
If we extend the discussion beyond just arabia and arena, every player would have a different strength on all open/closed map, because all open maps play out like arabia and closed maps play like arena, there will be a gap between open map enjoyers and closed map enjoyers. Then all these players are mixed together using one elo metric, that makes many team games feel completely one sided.
Are there any solutions ? Should we have 2 ranked ladder one for open map the other for closed map? To get more balanced games?