Before I have the kneejerk "p2w" reaction, can you answer a couple questions?

This is the impression of a brand new player, with lots of experience in other f2p multiplayer games.

I played this silly game for a few hours yesterday, and enjoyed the concept of building your own vehicle and fighting other people with it. It's fun at first, but after only a couple hours I started running into folks with just clearly superior equipment, who were in my PS range with the intent to seal club.

I know how Gaijin works, I played a shitton of war thunder, I got the whole prop vs. jet PTSD, and also ground forces fail tier balance PTSD. Didn't matter that much because it was FUN.

But here, oh boy. This is different. It's like some clown strapping a 1960's era gun onto a t1 tank, and then blowing away new players who don't have a chance. Yet the hyper-powerful and in demand weapons seem to all require a huge investment, or a huge grind, despite being used against very players who don't have a chance to acquire them yet.

So what's the deal here? Is the expectation really for a new player to spend more time on the marketplace, than playing the game, if they wish to be competitive? Seem odd to me.

Is the second expectation for a new player to purposefully gimp themselves, or even KNOW to purposefully gimp themselves, as to avoid running into sudden increases in PS bracket danger spikes?

Is that the game? Hide in low-ps bracket and farm for days, till you can afford something competitive?

What's up? This is what I'm seeing.

2000 and below is basically shitcans with machineguns and other white weapons, the occasional prick with his minimalist drone racecar shows up and ruins everything, but for the most part its balanced. 2000-2500 and some real assholes started appearing. I started seeing TOW, rocket launchers, several different types of stupidly powerful melee, all glued onto shitty minimalist vehicles packed full of high-tier devices for the purpose of bringing these weapons to bear against legitimately low-ps players.

Tell me I'm crazy, and that I missed some key component of the game. My options now are to either put up with insane imbalance for dozens of hours until I can get the same weapons, buy them outright with real money so its equal now, or not play the actual game part of the game, and instead spend my time camping the marketplace competing with russian bots that instantly undercut everything I list.

Looks like a raw deal to me. All in all I would judge the "new player experience" in Crossout to be fairly terrible. Especially because it seems so fun and interesting at first.