Profile of Reverb

Because the game tries to match you with whomever is searching for a game at the same time. It would work better if there were more players playing.

If your rank with random 4v4s is low you're kinda screwed. It's pretty much entirely random who is going to have the worse teammates.

Back when I played 4v4 randoms a bit for fun, I was playing soviets and doing retarded spam strats to mess around. Tanked my elo there. It's pretty much unplayable now, everyone it matches me with is god-awful. It would require insane amounts of effort to raise my elo to get out of those ranks. It's entirely dependent on which team gets lucky and has the least bad players.

Moral of the story is start out good

This is exactly what happened, in the first 10 games (these are with a smurf account) in Soviet and OKW, no one dropped, no one was AFK, everyone in the match was a good player, the result of which was high rank after the first 10 matches (Soviet had 100% win rate, OKW had 70% win rate). When I did this with OST, the first 4 games had AFK players, probably 6-7 of them had people on my team that dropped after 1-2 minutes, the result of which was a 10% win rate and rank 2500 or so....now if I play Soviet or OKW in 4v4, they are mostly enjoyable, but every single game with OST is anal cancer, and I mostly lose the matches, further sinking rank, making them progressively more and more cancerous.

Is Elo shared across factions or does every faction have its own Elo rating? Is there a way to tank you Elo rating in a certain faction? The problem I'm having is I think my Elo rating for OST is very high, but my rank is very low, putting me on teams where the three other players are really bad, and my high Elo is supposed to "even this out", the actual result is every game is lost within the first 5 minutes because of how bad the players on my team consistently are. The evidence I have for this is virtually every game that I win with with OST I will have like 120-150k damage, 200-300 kills, 100 deaths, 25-40 caps, whereas everyone else on my team has around 25-35k damage, 1:3 K, like 5-10 caps.
Converse this with my OKW, I somehow have top 100 ranking, but every team I am on is very balanced, and the matches are what I would consider evenly made/fought.
There is also almost never any AFK or drops in the OKW matches, virtually every match with my OST has AFK, droppers.

How is Elo determined in COH2? Does it interact with ranking at all in organizing the automatch? Reason I ask is if I have a faction where I'm ranked in the top 100, I usually get other very high rank people on my team, if I have a very low rank on a faction, it usually gets placed with other very low rank players, this seems to cause a complete imbalance, where you are likely to win matches with your high ranking faction with high Elo but get stuck into a black hole which basically only goes down and down with a low ranking faction if you have high Elo where you are paired with low Elo players in attempt to "even out" the combined Elo of the team. Seems tailor made to cause complete imbalance where one team has more evenly skilled players where the other team has maybe two good players and two bad players or one very good player and 3 bad players.
I don't care about rank, but the quality of game play with my high ranking factions makes them actually enjoyable, but the game play in low ranking factions feels like I'm smashing my teeth with a hammer. In the factions where I have high rank, the stats are almost always very even across all players in the match, games typically last 20-30 minutes 50/50 about win/los., In my low rank factions, I'll usually have 3-5x the damage, kills, caps, Kill/Death ratio of everyone else on my team, games are either over in about 5-10 minutes or drag on over an hour with about a 25/75 win/loss.

I think UKF are in a better spot right now than USF, Sections are very good when played with precision. UKF seems to be a faction that can be very powerful early game if played with no mistakes, but make one and your game is toast. USF on the other hand just sucks from the get go and only comes into its own in late game.

Underrated unit.