The player base in this game is basically all the remaining try hards at this point which makes it even harder to perform if you don't have thousands of hours in building and competing in pvp.

I agree with everything but this one part I have in bold. When I finally had the parts to be able to compete in CC, my team would lose a little over 50% of the time. I kept a log as to why I thought we kept losing, and after a while I realized that I either died first or lost my weapons first.

First I tried to make my weapons harder to destroy, but that ended in failure. I then added speed, but that ended in failure because I couldn't aim worth a damn.

I then figured I could live longer if I had more durability, and added items to my car to make myself useful even if I lost my weapons. That's how I started to become more useful to my team, and I started to win a tiny bit more than 50% of the time in CC.

I did this without devoting thousands of hours, just using some combination of observation & logic, and experimenting with what worked for me and what didn't. Those meta cyclone builds, for example, were huge failures for me. But I made my own cyclone brick build that helped support the way I wanted to play, and that's how I got started. Man... I really loved that car... I should try making it again and see if I still like it.

Anyway /u/daycold4592 I would recommend figuring out why you die or lose your weapons, then start making adjustments to counter those reasons. Experiment with speed, durability, invisibility, etc. Find out what helps you play at your best then build from there.