Hi sf
I hope you and all the guys at ICDG are well and Victor isn't causing any problems.
I don't have a definitive answer to this, I can only go by my experience of map matches each season. I would therefore have to say, yes it does count as at the beginning of the last few seasons I have had no gear and teams 1 & 2 levels below me have walked through me with full L3 gear. As soon as I start getting gear after a few days, the opposite happens and I walk through them instead. Maybe sometimes it has been great strats on their part but I suspect more often than not it has been down to gear.
I would suggest you log a ticket with support for this question but you are likely to get an answer that is totally unrelated