Unless you are willing to pour money into this game in amount that would let you buy several royal estates, forget about PvP. There are literally two PvP events you can consider: Arena for dailies and Training grounds.

Level up your character, make alt account, level it up around same level and use it for standard Arena practice battles for daily quest and theme arena when it appears. Use it also for key farming in training grounds.

The rest PvP events (Sage, Matsuri) - forget they exist. Saves you a lot of frustration.

Oh, and never ever ever ever let yourself believe that you can achieve anything significant in this game as F2P. You can't. Powerful characters are strongly locked behind paywalls and if they are ever released for F2P it only means they are obsolete. There is no amount of playing and time poured into this game that let you even sniff chances against heavy payers. It may be different on China servers (never played, so dunno), but on west Publisher made * sure F2P peasants can't measure even slightly to whale master race.

It used to be maybe not different, but not that bad either, but that's long gone.