OMG the low tier grind

So I thought I'd grind the AMX line due to the BC top of the tree. I wanted to try to limit credits spent and work on the grind, so I thought I'd start at T3, grind my way up, limiting gold or free XP use.

OMG in my AMX 38 I faced off against another AMX 38 and we literally could not pen each other. COULD.NOT.PEN. Not even his side or back, just no. My few gold rounds fared no better, but even worse is that my HE also did ZERO damage. And I mean ZERO. Sure I could track him, over and over and over again, but the game ended while we were both still undamaged – over 50 hits from point blank range. That was so many shots that I was able to try every spot – cupola no, lower plate no, upper plate no, side of turret no, that little hatch in the front no, that box sticking out no, just no.

The tank is also so turgid and slow, that there is no flanking or or doing anything useful at all. Not like you can do much spotting with that bad crew and no vision or camo or sixth sense. There are no directives below T5, not that a noob would have the credits for it. Not that a noob would know about doing anything other than shooting at this point.

How is this fun? I get that WG wants to move people up the lines, but a new player with this as his first line, running stock, will have ABSOLUTELY NO FUN playing the game. Players with a less than 100% crew, without sixth sense, or credits or gold or xp can't just free XP up the lines. They're new, they want to see if this game is fun before actually spending ANY money on it. There is no business model I can see that makes ANY sense here. Yeah sure "hur dur WG", but that's not actual reasoning.

IMO every tank at every tier should have some saving grace EVEN WHEN STOCK! Slow? Then have a gun that can do some dmg. Fast, then have a weak gun but you can flank and get to weak spots. At the very least EVERY gun in the game should be able to shoot someone in some weak spot and do some damage. It's a tank warfare game, every player needs to be able to shoot his gun no matter where in the grind he. That why people are playing it.

WTF? It makes absolutely no sense to make low tiers as horrid as this. I don't recall it this bad my first time through with the Russian or German meds, so I'm sure some lines are better than others. If I had started my move up the tiers as a noob with the French line, I would have quit this game end of story. WG would have lost a fair amount of revenue from me. There are simply no excuses for this.

So yeah this is a rant, but I'm interested in an actual discussion that is not "hur dur WG". This is perplexing to me, I am perplexed.

BTW screw that grind, AMX 40 is nearly as bad and even slower, so I'll at least free XP to T5 and test the waters.