I’m sure this has been brought up before, so maybe I’m bringing this up again in vain, but still.
One thing which severely concerns me when it comes to AoE4’s ranked system is its teamgames ladder. The way matchmaking currently works for teams there is - it calculates average ELO for both teams, and awards points for win/loss based on these average ELOs (no penalty for someone much higher or much lower than the calculated average).
In theory, this system makes sense. In practice, combined with the fact that there’s no limit on possible ELO difference between teammates, it makes the system extremely abuseable by pre-mades. You can look up current top 1 of TG ladder and see what I mean - you have one “normal” account being queued together with tanked smurf accounts, and as a result, he gets insane amount of points for wins against average level teams.
Not only this makes top of TG ladder a joke, but this also creates incentive to create these tanked low ELO smurfs, which means they have ruined a bunch of games for someone in the process of being de-ranked.
There might be a few legit cases of Conq level players queueing up with bronze friends or w/e, but I think this is a minority.
One way to combat this which I’ve seen brought up is simply to limit possible ELO difference for players in a pre-made team. However, I have 2 proposals which don’t necessarily forbid to queue up with someone much lower ELO, but make farming ELO this way unviable:
- Change matchmaking in such a way that team ELO is calculated by highest ELO player in it, or at least it’s severely skewed towards the highest ELO player, and/or points are adjusted accordingly. This way high ELO account playing with 500/600 ELOs becomes pointless, as they’ll get matched with high level teams anyway, and/or get points according to their ELO, without any influence from 500/600 ELO smurfs. Randomly matched teams should be exempt from this proposal, otherwise it becomes really punishing for high ELO random TG players; it already can be a pretty miserable experience.
- Each pre-made team gets its own separate ELO, and playing with randoms is another separate rating. This is the way Starcraft2 did it. Initial seeding for each new team can be done with their average TG ELO - in this case it won’t allow to get higher ranking for less effort. IMO it would be the best solution, it does however require players to play a lot of games for each separate ranking to be accurate. But it might not be that bad. I think AoE4’s amount of TG playerbase is healthy enough to make this work, too.