Noob Help

One basic of the game is that there is a level based progression system, and as you go through the levels, you UNLOCK upgrades for the characters, meaning that all of the upgrades are not available to you (as a new player), per character, from the start. Similar to Call of Duty or even a Gears of War title, you start your character out at "Level 1", then you climb to 10, then after you reach 10 you can basically "prestige" your character which resets the level 10 rank back down to one, but gives you a gold star and moves you on to the next bracket. If you go into the changing booth (aka the character select), you can see that each character starts out as level 1 Recruit with 5 stars (under the phrase "Recruit") being grayed out. I think the system goes like this:

Starting Rank:

Recruit Levels 1-10

Advanced Levels 1-10

Specialist Levels 1-10

Elite Levels 1-10

Super Elite Levels 1-10

Master Levels 1-10

Grandmaster goes on permanently, as you can reach an infinite amount of levels in this game (in theory), but you stop acquiring standard upgrades after reaching the "Master" levels. The "Advanced" and "Specialist" brackets might actually be backwards (and may need flip flopped) because I forget and have nearly all characters Grandmastered, but my fundamental point still stands...

Any and all upgrades acquired are directly applicable to online play, meaning that other players can and will have a technical advantage over you as you start. But with that said: There's alot of upgrades that are close to worthless and/or bad, but obviously alot of them are going to be very good as well (which I will talk about in my guide).

So you're not going to want to go in to PVP online with real people without first getting comfortable with your control scheme, turning ON aim assist, and giving the character you're using some basic upgrades (at the start all characters can fill the slots)... Go into character select and press the middle black bar on the PS4 controller to apply upgrades. 

Also play Turf Takeover as opposed to the other games because it's (strangely) both friendly to new players but is also more of an expert gameplay mode... Some of the other modes are essentially a mosh pit and this game has bugs and technical issues that make it very hard to deal with low skilled players inside of a mosh pit type of arena; so you want to get a little bit of separation so that if and when you develop some type of skill you are able to actually apply it as opposed to having 9 dudes run up from behind on you all holding hands that just press the trigger button one time each and it kills you...