I haven’t looked at Hoku’s posting history, but what I recall is this post where Hoku referred to the announcement trailer for brawl and phrased the usual speculation people have made from brawl → aram. (which to be fair, does hold up with how mirror matching worked with the 5% rate)
In that same topic, the OP posted a quote from Spazzo from reddit:
aram has an mmr system, it’s just it’s pretty much ignored
like it’ll make a match before it’ll make a balanced match
but if there’s enough people in queue to make a balanced match, it’ll do that
it lessens very, very quickly
like quicker than qm
so that’s what I’ve been repeating since then. As far as how that functions, I haven’t checked other things spazzo has posted, but I can speculate.
The game already has multiple levels of AI and different version of that ai. eg ai acts differently when it’s on the players side (respond to pings) then it does when it’s vs a full team of ai (no player to ping them). So based on where aram may be trying to find mmr, it might fill a suitable level of ai, or like with qm’s ‘expanding’, it quickly disregards the target mmr and just fills.
Part of a system having mmr is the adjustment it makes after the match; if an ai is pulled, then it may not make any changes to the mmr regardless of win/lose.