What Questions do you have for the Developers?

A note on players dropping out of games. The big problem is that you need losses anyway, otherwise the matchmaking will put you against stronger and stronger opponents. Thus, there's a strong incentive to drop out - if the game looks like a loss then it's better to drop out after 2-3 minutes, than to "waste" 10 minutes to achieve nearly the same result (minimal silver, no gold, and a loss). I also see a lot of players who just try to grab 3 beacons or so, and drop out after they have them. They either get a quick loss, or a win with a high likelyhood of 5 gold.

I would strongly advocate to fix this, and even though a "leave penalty" would help, it's better to fix the incentive system. In another thread I suggested this:
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We add damage and beacons together, say by converting both damage and beacons to a "combined score", where 1k damage is worth one point and any beacon is worth some points. The latter should depend on average hangar level I think, as it should be different for 1/1 hangars and 12/12 hangars, I'd imagine you could scale it with the average weight of a robot. I'd say one beacon should be worth as much as taking out average half a robot, that would translate into 60-80 points at max level. You could even tune it such that the incentive for new players at lower levels is a bit higher, to support beacon capping there. The 14 gold is then distributed among the players, proportionally to their combined score.

This would have several advantages over the current system:

• Both capping beacons and doing damage is rewarded.
• It makes sense for beacon cappers to inflict as much damage as possible, while 5xEcuCossack hangars will get less gold.
• It makes sense for damage dealers to cap beacons.
• If one player dominates a game, he will get much more gold than the other players. If many players are even, they will get the same gold.
• Players who drop out, or stand around doing nothing get nothing. Players that do stuff like cap 3 beacons and quit the game will hardly ever get gold, unless they continue to fight. One way of cheating eliminated. 

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As for the ELO ranking, games where a player drops out before using all of his robots should not count, neither as win nor as loss. Not using robots in the hangar before dropping out is a clear sign of tanking. In fact, I'd give zero rewards for games where a player drops out prematurely, a player will only get rewards if he quits after using all robots.
The same would be for player activity, by inactivity I'd define any period of 15 seconds or longer that a player doesn't give any inputs to the game. If a player is inactive for half a battle or more, don't use the game result for matchmaking ranking and give him no rewards. 

Honest question here, not stirring nothing. Why is a good match maker hard to create. This is my first PVP game, so even after almost a year, I'm still learning a whole lot of things regarding PVPa. I'm from the Cretaceous/Jurrassic, and was never really a gamer.

Pix is the author of their own misery in this case. The players are doing what they were always likely to do, test the boundaries and look for an edge.

Pix has the all the data needed to make an empirical matchmaker. Weapon damage by frame, bot survival time, etc. As weapons / bots are tweaked, the MM would adjust based on the incoming data. This could generate a very precise estimate of the hangar effectiveness. Once you have a pool of players with similar hangars, you can use pilot effectiveness as a metric to create balanced teams.

I suspect they chose not to do this for a variety of reasons:

1. They want something simple to maintain *and* easy for them to manipulate
2. They want to generate quick matchups (even at the expense of hangar parity)
3. They want the general "upward" push to get players to keep investing
4. They don't want to discourage low skill, high hangar players (who are likely spenders)

Part of the overall problem is that they seem to want to keep the MM calculations secret, as if that is somehow going to keep it from getting gamed. A very simple, transparent approach with defined brackets (e.g. "Tier 1 is light and medium bots up to level 3 *and* players up to level 10") would probably be healthier for the game than the current situation. Then you could have in-game fedback about what and what not to upgrade / invest in, and openly account (and reward) for placement in out-of-tier match ups.