I'm a level 24 first-wipe noob. And in the past several days, I've killed more high-level "chads" than I have in the entire rest of the wipe combined.
Actually watching how these high-level players play, without high-tier gear making them largely impervious to anything other than blind luck or other high tier gear, many "chads" are actually really just not very good at this game.
Nothing has changed about my playstyle. I'm just winning fights now because suddenly when I get the jump on you, you can't just stand in the open and tank all the shots in the world while you turn around and gun me down, or run directly through multiple lines of fire without any real consequences. If I outplay you positionally, you're almost certainly dead. It doesn't matter what gear you have.
Which, to me, tells me two things-
First, this is EXACTLY what the game should feel like late wipe. Maybe not this extreme with damage sensitivity, but 50% of what it is now would solve literally like 85% of the issues with "the late-game meta" right now. Yes, high-tier armor would still be better than lower-tier armor. Same with ammo. But when everything's a lot more lethal by default, there's a whole lot more options available to even low level scrubs (like me) who start later in a wipe.
Second, if many high-level players are actually this bad at the game, then everything they bitch so loudly about in this subreddit suddenly sounds a whole lot less like a bad game and a whole lot more like a skill issue. Maybe cheaters aren't rampant. Maybe desync really isn't that much of an issue. Maybe you're just… not good, and dying to things far enough above your self-perceived skill level that the other player CLEARLY has to be cheating or the game itself conspired against you.
For those of you who clearly fall into the second category, I would like to offer a single piece of advice you've all offered me:
Git. Gud.
