The game is free to use, it's not free to play. It runs roughly $1,400 USD to unlock and 100% level 1 useful mech. If you wanna be at the bottom of the ranks, you don't have to spend a dime. Dev created bots make for easy matchmaking, but are not fairly distributed amongst the team. You will also get bombarded with scams in chat. Those are probably made by the devs too. If not, the devs dont care about blocking IP addresses, accounts, or names.