2) Your rating is not a pure measure of your skill MMR in a team based game is, and always will be a measure of your ability to win matches.
Just to build upon this:
There are a lot of different facets to ‘ability to win matches’. Players can be good at winning duels or winning team fights or picking winning fights or fighting on the right points or rotating between points or playing good builds for the meta or swapping to the right build for the match-up or filling in effectively to balance your team composition or playing hard every game or not tilting or encouraging teammates and keeping people focused.
Or a whole lot of things I didn’t mention in that run-on sentence above.
The difference between a pro-level player and an experienced but middling journeyman (say, gold level) player isn’t that the pro is a bit better at all of these things. It’s almost always the case that the pro is good at almost all of these things, while your middling, experienced player is good (sometimes even pro-level!) at some of these things, and just a dumpster fire at others.
Good but not great players include people that can beat everyone they face in a 1v1 but are constantly engaged in bad fights (trying to kill a guardian on a fully capped point with their thief), people who can’t win a duel for the life of them but pick teamfights they can contribute to well, people who know a single trick (condi mesmer that always goes far!) that sometimes dominates and sometimes feeds, people who often play well but tilt and throw as soon as something goes badly (thus losing games that could be recovered and won).
The really insidious part of this? If you are one of those players, you’re probably really focused on the parts of your game that you are good at, and blind to those that are holding you back. You’re also blind to the good things your teammates are doing (that you are not good at), while their flaws (in areas that are your strengths) are on full display.
Which is why you think your teammate (with the same MMR and similar match win performance) is terrible, and why that teammate thinks that you are terrible. It’s why there’s a pretty big range of play (generally the 75th to the 95th percentile, roughly) that is just an utterly miserable rage-fast, a bunch of skilled but fundamentally flawed players picking at each other’s faults.
If you want to get better, don’t look at that ‘scrub’ with the same rating as you in disbelief. Figure out what he’s doing that you aren’t – because, odds are, that’s what’s holding you back.
slow clap
Bra (80 Guard), Fixie Bow (80 Ranger), Wcharr (80 Ele)
Xdragonshadowninjax (80 Thief)