I'll try and keep this short but was anyone else having terrible matchmaking during the splatfest outside of the normal network stuff? In short me and my friend tried to playing together (team money) and essentially were put on a 20 loss streak that only broke when we played separately. We aren't mlg pro but we also aren't bad at splatoon but it seemed like when we tried to play together we'd be put against players who were much better then us, side note we never ran into a single team fame. And how come the tri battle was only full off team money even tho team love was leading by half time? Idk between the networking issues and being punished for playing with my friends it's killing my enjoyment of the game.
Matchmaking typically has to balance four factors:
Skill level
Ping/connection quality
Weapon composition
Not making you wait in queue too long
During Splatfests, one more parameter has to be added:
All your teammates must be on the same team, and prefer opponents on a different team
The more factors have to be considered, the more it's going to have to compromise on some of them. Splatfest teams are a hard requirement that can't be compromised, teams will never be mixed, and that limits the pool of eligible teammates and opponents considerably. So yes, matchmaking quality does suffer as a result.
Plus Splatoon is a very volatile game in general, even when players should be evenly matched it often doesn't look like they are as soon as someone gets a lead and holds onto it. I would conjecture that the system has a harder time than usual accurately measuring player skill levels when matchmaking is inconsistent... which is a bit of a negative feedback loop.
As for Tricolor, a non-mirror needs all three teams, but Team Fame literally didn't exist.
I don't own Splatoon 3, but I had comparable experiences of the Splatfest matchmaking feeling much less balanced than normal matchmaking in Splatoon 1 and 2. Maybe it's something to do with the team-based matchmaking overriding any skill-based matchmaking or something to that effect, but whatever it is, I'm confident that this effect's real, and has been around since the start.