It’s illogical for high-ELO teams to risk losing significant ELO points by facing low-ELO teams when the potential reward is minimal.
While it’s possible for a low-ELO team to defeat a high-ELO team, it’s not worth risking 40 ELO points for a potential gain of only 5 points.
We demand more balanced matchmaking. Age of Mythology requires a different approach to matchmaking compared to Age of Empires.
Elo (which, side note, is named after a person, it is not an acronym, hence “Elo”, not “ELO”) works by giving points based on the expected outcome. If you are expected to win, and you do win, you’ll gain a small amount of Elo. If you’re expected to lose but you win, you’ll gain a lot of Elo. And vice versa. This represents the fact that it’s a bigger “upset” for a low-Elo player to defeat a higher-Elo player. It just makes sense that that’s how it should work. No different to an RPG giving you more XP for defeating an enemy many levels higher than you than it does for beating a low-level mook.
That’s the true original Elo system, but it’s possible AoM uses another system like Glicko-2 which is more complicated to use since it also applies a “ratings deviation”, which is an estimate of how accurate the Elo is based on how long it’s been since their last game.
All the above assumes 1v1s. To modify for team games is a very difficult problem. It’s hard to balance teams that are themselves unbalanced. For example, who would be better, a team with three 800 players and one 1600 player, or a team made up of 4 1000 players? Both have equal averages, after all. And should everyone gain or lose the same amount of Elo (because the team does win or lose together) or should higher Elo players gain less Elo for winning if they carried their lower-Elo team to victory?
Age of Mythology requires a different approach to matchmaking compared to Age of Empires.
Why?
Matchmaking is difficult, especially with team games. With a relatively small player base, it just becomes difficult to find the right number of players at similar Elos who are searching at the same time in the same part of the world.
In any case, who really cares about winning or losing elo ? I mean as it stands, it’s just a matchmaking system where there’s NO reward associated with your elo level, whether you have 1800 elo pro-player, or 500 elo the noob among the noobs there’s no distinction, not even a league or portrait system.
‘’ or should higher Elo players gain less Elo for winning if they carried their lower-Elo team to victory?‘’
AoE4 does this.
There should be a limit to the loss or gain of Elo points. Let’s suppose that in a 3 vs 3 game you face a low Elo team and your teammates lose their internet connection at any moment you will lose like 60 Elo points. That is unfair.
It is very difficult to earn Elo points and then lose them in an instant due to the internet connection of the game servers.
You’re absolutely right that disconnects should not result in losing Elo. The problem is that that’s technically very difficult, if not impossible, to implement. Because the game can’t tell the difference between your Internet dropping and you pressing alt-f4 to ragequit.
There could maybe be discussion around this edge case and suggestions for how to improve the handling of it. I think that could be quite constructive.
In age of empire 3, there was an ELO system for any game you played. But why didn’t they implement it anymore? I mean, if I play a ranked game it’s right that I have a ranking, but even if I play quick battles it has to give me a score, otherwise I never know if I’m playing against someone much stronger than me, or someone much weaker, thus making the games less exciting.
In AoE2 quickplay gives you an Elo. It just keeps it hidden from you. The idea being that it’s meant to be a casual game mode and showing you the number would create stress around that number.
I suspect AoM does the same.
It may be a casual mode, but I don’t think it’s fun for a new player to face someone with a very high ELO. What I’m saying is that when someone hosts a game, whoever enters has their rank visible (like in age3) and not just their rank in the ranked. In fact, I often find myself with people who have 0 points in the ranked but are actually pros.