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.
Street Fighter 6 uses two systems. League Points are a “keep them playing” type, and Master Rate is pretty much pure Elo.
Everyone starts with LP only and initial placement matches put you into a league with progressively fewer guard rails as you live higher. Rookie league can’t lose LP at all, there’s a win streak bonus up to gold, and you can’t demote to a lower league until platinum. Throughout it all there’s very slight upward pressure on LP, you get slightly more more a win then you lose for a loss.
Finally you reach the topmost league, Master, the final guard rails fall away and you’re given 1500MR to join in the net zero Elo ranking pool. You basically need to demonstrate that you have a willingness to keep playing before they will use that style of matchmaking. “Real” skill based ranking effectively begins there, with the lower ranks being made more to show dedication rather than just ability.