I swear to god this game has a fetish of placing me in teams of deadweights against a team with one Alchemist IV. I'm just Initiate IV and still outplayed many of them.
i have the opposite problem - i'm alchemist IV and i don't belong there yet, still just learning the game and am constantly put in a position where the team is upset with me because it takes me 10 seconds to figure out what to buy or get confused about enemy abilities.
yeah I've heard Gabe Newell has a personal vindicta against you. When you start searching for a match he gets a notification and carefully selects everyone in your match just to mess with you.