Team game matchmaking is better than most people want to admit. But it has its fair share of problems.
Why is it better than people want to admit? The thing is, even between evenly matched players we can get onesided games. Just watch pretty much any tournament, or your own 1v1 games. Sometimes everything goes wrong, and you get stomped. Or sometimes you wreck the opponent so hard, you think he is trolling. Thats normal. But if the same thing happens to our teammate, it gets very frustrating. I know that shooting your boar happens, even to pros, but if my flank does it and goes up 60s late because of it and instantly dies, it feels horrible.
Id say this variance is even bigger in teamgames than in 1v1 because you can’t come back by building counter units and the rush distance is shorter. This explains why we can have onesided matches with players of similar elo; its just a part of teamgames.
However, there are also two problems that are a direct consequence of the match making system.
The first is that two mediocre players usually beat a strong player and a noob. If your team has two 1500 players and the opponent has a 1300 as flank and a 1700 as pocket, chances are the 1300 player will die before his pocket has an impact. This could be avoided be beeing more restrictive in the elo range a match can have, but ofc the problem would be öonger queue times.
The second and probably bigger problem is something that is hardly ever talked about, id call it “rubber banding”. In short, the difference between a high teamgame mmr and a low teamgame mmr are very low (compared to 1v1; reason see below). The distribution is extremly steep and a few wins or losses can make the difference between “above average” and “top 5%”. Compared to the 1v1 distribution, the team game distribution is “pulled together” with most players beeing very close to the average rating.
This ofc makes the whole thing very unstable. A 1500 (teamgame) player might be an above average player who got lucky the last few games (eg opponents dropping or öuck with rnd civs) or a top 5% player who lost a few games in a row for similar reasons.
I think the frustrating experiences of losing due to other players mistakes cant be fixed, thats part of human psychology. Nor can the elo-range of the matches, because waiting isn’t fun. But “rubber banding” absolutly needs to go to better separate the players by skill level.
“Short” explanation what rubber banding is and why it is in the game:
There used to be a problem with players who would get ever higher mmr by teaming up with smurf accounts. Two 3.3k accounts would team up with two fresh 1k accounts, play vs 2.1k accounts and often win, getting higher and higher elo.
The devs stepped in an did two things. They partially reset team mmr, bringing everyone pretty close to 1k. One would expect the distribution to flatten again, but so far it doesnt (or only very slowly), and thats where rubber banding comes into play. If you win a match, not every player on the team gets the same amount of points. Rather, the lowest rated player gets the most points, the highest rated gets the least. This fixed the smurfing problem - it was pointless now, because the smurfs and not the main accounts would get all the points - but it means that a player who regularly plays with accounts below his own rating will lose points even if he wins 50% of the matches, even vs. equally strong opponents.
This may not sound that bad, until you realize that its ANY account that plays with lower rated teammates, not just premades. And since every account above around 1.2k (exact number is a bit hard to calculate) has (on average) teammates below its own rating, simply because there are more 1.1k rated accounts than 1.3k rated accounts, this means that any account above around 1.2k gets drawn down (and vice versa, lower rated accounts get pulled up). The entire elo distribution gets pulled together, instead of flattening out over time.
Note that this rubber banding does not mean that a bad player can surpas a good player, nor that you will be of lower or higher rank than you otherwise would. A top 1% player will still be top 1%. But it means that Top 1% is very close to top 10%, and top 10% very close to average, making unfair matches happening a lot more often.