I was watching my friend play ranked with his two new buddies, he's 103 and they were around level 30-40ish.
I noticed that most of the teams they encountered were mainly green and blue shields, and when looking at the levels they were also a fairly low level too.
Skip forward an hour or so, I decide to jump into ranked with them (we're all in bronze as I only touched ranked week 1 and it was awful)
Games are full of purple/gold teams and bubbles
Now our squad has two level 100+ and a level 30 the matchmaking has changed completely.
So not only does ranked have level based matchmaking meaning if you want to play ranked, play it as soon as possible.
ITS ALSO DISABLES CONSOLE ONLY CROSSPLAY
You must play with pc, which is a far cry from the usual bungie PvP (D2) where PvP and competitive PvP was console only until you queue with a pc player.