User blog comment:Texas Snyper/Elo Hell and You: Part 1 - The Impassable Barrier/@comment-68.54.17.30-20110829220603

Basic statistics: the amount of games required to be played to reach true ELO is raised to the power of the random number of matchups in your team (in comparison to a 1v1 system). In a 5v5 scenario, this means you must play TO THE POWER OF 5 times the number of games you would need to play in a 1v1 scenario to reach your true elo. Lets take a nice round number of 20 games (used as entry levels in many 1v1 tournament ranking systems). You need to play 20^5 games to reach your true elo in a 5v5 scenario. That's 3.2 MILLION games.