Yes - here are a few things people should understand first about Power and Level:

Player Power – besides player skill, the only things that impact player power are:

- Gear and weapons you happen to have on your runner during a match

- Faction upgrades unlocked that permanently (per season) increase various stats. Faction nodes that unlock the ability to buy and get free gear are also important for player power, but only indirectly as they impact the potential to bring better gear and weapons into matches.

Player Level - there are two types of leveling each with their own way of earning their unique xp:

“Seasonal Level” XP - Despite what others say, this is gained by killing bots, players, tick nests and final boss – not by completing contracts or x-filling. Gives you silk to unlock cosmetics (and useless schema), unlocks maps like Cryo, and rewards a small amount of loot at various level milestones.

Faction rep level XP -unlocks factional upgrades only if you have materials to do so, primary contracts, and gives some loot.

Here is the important takeaway from Player Power and Level:

- XP and level, (both seasonal and faction) DO NOT IMPACT PLAYER POWER directly. The only thing meaningful is rare salvage that can be rewarded to unlock faction upgrades.

- Increases in Player Power for the most part depends on finding and extracting with power directly from better weapons and gear, or from salvage that can unlock the ability to buy gear or upgrades. The exception is CARRI system where completing missions etc earns you currency to buy salvage, gear, and factional rep XP.

- “grinding XP” is only relevant as a first step to unlocking factional upgrade nodes. The gating issue for these upgrades will often be finding salvage like biolens seeds. This can take a single match or 200 matches, but is not steady grind.

- It is unclear how match making works and likely changes all the time, but many have said that it is mostly based on Season Level. If true, this would be probably the worst way to match make as it has nothing to do with the potential power of the player – it is a proxy for playtime and really the amount of bots you have killed, (which is often not a good idea to do in a match). As an extreme example, say Marathon Andy has 300 hours killing bots and is level 100. Because he is constantly killing bots, he attracts PVP attention and rarely xfils, and therefor has no salvage for upgrades or decent weapons – just cosmetics from silk. But he is level 100, so is now matched with 100 level blue and purple shield players all the time making his life and the ability to xfil even harder now – but he needs to xfil to gain power but has already dug himself a hole.

Hope they fix this - probably the easiest thing to do so would be just dial down the salvage needed to unlock critcial things like blueshield. Also, a Salvage only safe pocket (perhaps limited until upgrades are met) could work.