I played Nexon's CA for 5 years, starting at launch in '08, when I was still in high school. CA was my first FPS and I made more friends on this game than any other game I have ever played to this day. Back then, we used to complain about hackers, Brazilians with 200 ping, and Nexon's backsliding promise about the game never becoming P2W (spoiler alert: it became P2W by 2010).
By comparison, Valofe's current iteration of the game reaches heights of P2W and jank that are far beyond Nexon's capability on their worst day. The "Reloaded engine" is a clumsy effort from circa 2018 to upgrade a 10-year-old game running on a 16-year-old engine designed with DX9 and WinXP in mind, which was common software in Korea through the early 2010s, but already long in the tooth by Western standards upon the US release in '08 - it was ancient tech by the time Reloaded was slapped together in 2018. This may sound like I'm ragging on the game because of its age, but TF2 is older and has been better maintained over the years.
Valofe is, by their own definition, a "republisher", meaning they take over live service games that other developers no longer find profitable. They focus on poorer markets that the big developers don't support, to squeeze the last bit of value out of old games. This, and the dated tech, are why CA:R's player base is largely made up of players from Turkey and CIS states. High ping is a problem for any FPS game, but modern games have ways to mitigate the problem. CA:R does not have that capability. If you're playing from the US, or any country in the western hemisphere, you will be playing with people 5,000+ miles away from you. Apparently, they do have one US server, but it's seldom used. If you want to actually get into a match, you'll need to use the EU server.
To their credit, Valofe at least *tried* to appease the core gamers who just want a solid FPS experience like they remember from 2008, they just... didn't try very hard. They couldn't court a decent player base, they couldn't combat the hackers, and they focused too hard on paid gun skins. By 2021, the old player base was essentially gone, and since then, Valofe has done nothing but try to squeeze every last bit of money they can get out of this old game.
This game had a decent community, and people who put in work for free to try to make it a better game. If Valofe had listened to those people - for example, the folks who ran the CBL - then perhaps Combat Arms would still be a game worth playing. Unfortunately, it's too late for that now. CA is not at all worth playing unless you're a) living in a former Soviet state and you're VAC banned and can't get on CS2, or b) killing some time in a PC-bang in South Korea. For everyone else, go look up old montages and clan match videos on YouTube, relive the good old days for a little while, and then play something else.