I am curious as to how matchmaking in unranked works. I seem to get placed with under-geared players more than one would expect from random assignment to teams (even when there are no premades in the que). Is this due to some invisible ELO metric? Any information about how unranked matchmaking works would be appreciated as I’m just very curious. Thanks!

The matchmaking is pretty fair, most likely its that your just going up against premade that aren't a "guild premade". They are a premade but they each belong to a different guild or none. That might be throwing you off a bit in thinking you always randomly get the underdog team .

There is no functional matchmaking outside of absolute peak hours because ranked doesn't have enough of a playerbase to make it work

Unranked match making is a joke and doesn’t work and hasn’t since it was introduced.

 

To answer the OPs question, yes, there is a hidden ELO that Bioware won’t tell us about.

 

They say it’s based on skill and there is supposed to be another metric based on gear and another to do with premades, healers and tanks.

 

The only part I’ve experienced working in the last two years is the healer / tank role splits.

 

The rest of it is a joke and doesn’t work at all. But we can’t say why it doesn’t work or what’s broken because Bioware won’t tell us how the hidden ELO works.

 

If they were transparent about it, we could properly test it and help them fix it. But they are too worried someone will work out how to exploit it . Which is a complete joke because it’s regs and not ranked.

 

Plus with the deserter timer and the requirement to win to get your missions or conquest done, it would make it harder to exploit than when they introduced it.

 

So IMO, they should just tell us how it works and make our reg ELO public like they do with the ranked ELO. Then we can properly test it to see how to improve it or define what’s broken.