Personally, I don’t like the fact that every team-based video game uses ELO, a system designed for a 1 on 1 game, to determine an individual’s skill.
While Elo (and side note: it’s a person’s name, not an acronym) isn’t perfect and systems like Glicko-2 are better even for 1v1s, is there a better system than Elo that could be used to rate players in team games? Especially if there’s a mix of pre-made teams and random teams thrown together by matchmaking?
Edit: extra bonus if it can be applicable in games that have both 1v1 and team game components where there might be a desire for some form of bleed between the two. (e.g. AoE2 where your starting Elo in one of them is based on your Elo in the other, if you’ve played a lot of one type of game before trying the other.)
I suspect games tinker with the formula behind the scenes, to accurately place people faster if nothing else. The more players the longer it could take for the skill of any one to show up in the numbers, so I bet they factor in other game specific metrics at least at first. There would be some risk of this being abused, but that’s less if they keep it a secret and maybe the progress numbers shown to players aren’t quite the same as the real numbers used to decide who to match them against.
Plenty of developers of competitive games with SBMM have said they actually make it more about keeping the player playing than actually giving a shit about their skill. They don’t use straight up elo, but everything they do does derive from it. They also don’t really disclose how they come to the numbers it assigns you; probably because they don’t want to expose exactly how their skinner box works.