Question for top ranked FTP players

I have two accounts: a light P2P account that I started mid December and a pure F2P account that I started early-mid February. I finish top 1 or 2 almost every day on both accounts for the past several weeks/months. In my opinion, the first few days of a F2P account largely determine the success. Intelligent farming, crystal usage, and patience can put a F2P player in a very solid position to sit around the top of the shard starting around week 2-3. If the player has a very good understanding of the meta, they can start farming shards from day 1 for meta defining characters.

For a player starting out completely fresh with no prior experience, remaining competitive and still being F2P is still very possible but will require much more time. I made some poor choices on my main account early during its life, such as spending the free starter crystals on chromiums, farming shards to unlock characters and then failing to continue farming higher, and not refreshing arena attempts. As a result, I missed out on important characters early on, namely GS. Yes, that account is not purely F2P, but I was able to correct those mistakes when I made my alternate account. The community is larger and resources are somewhat more accessible nowadays, so new F2P players may not suffer as much as long as they show incentive to do some research.

Since character stars are a much bigger deal at lower character and gear levels (larger relative power boost), unlocking GW and cantina as soon as possible is very important. Although I have never spent more than 30-40$ on this game, I don't believe P2P offers that much of an advantage. You unlock 7* characters very early on and will level up somewhat faster, depending on how much you dump into this game. It is possible that the hardcore P2P accounts were not on my shards, there were only a handful of players that I could confidently say were impossible to beat during the first few weeks in arena. A team of JC, Lumi, GS, St-Han/Sid, and the guaranteed chromium character from the first pack of the account (if not completely unlucky) will be easy to farm and is sufficient to grind out arena ranks to get into top 20-50 within the first week or two. Dooku hard modes are farmable extremely early, so he can be unlocked within reasonable time (~2-4 weeks) and can replace either JC or the chromium character. Once cantina opens, rewards can be funneled into QGJ/Daka/5s, which really don't take that long to obtain if you spend at least 100 crystals daily. Granted, my alt account was born during the rise of the speed meta, so QGJ had a massive impact on my arena team after I unlocked him about a week or two in, and allowed me to secure a top 20 (if not higher) spot every day as long as I refreshed arena attempts. The account hit lvl 70 the day of the lvl increase, so I never benefited from sitting at the cap. I would argue not much really changes, as your farm generally contributes to xp gain anyway.

In short, if you have the time and the understanding of the game, achieving a top F2P is actually not that hard at all. There are enough powerful characters available early on that will be capable of achieving relatively high ranks. After enough time and team optimization, a F2P character will be as good as any other player to hit rank 1 daily, even if there is no lvl pause. However, my circumstances may not be the same as those for other F2P players, so it not everything will be universally applicable.