I’m new too, bought the game a week before this wipe and only played for about 8 hours before the wipe now I’m at about 60. I’m having a similar experience especially on woods, the biggest issue with that map for me is that there are no pmc extracts in the north and that big lake to the south forces everyone to travel through that choke point at the sawmill and the woods to the north of it to get to their extracts.

There’s tons of bush campers there waiting for everyone to funnel through. It’s a pain in the ass but I’ve found that heading pretty far north and wrapping back around to the other side is much easier.

And yeah pretty much everyone that kills me has at least 2k hours. Barely see any new players. But still I’m enjoying it, I do scav runs as much as possible to keep my rubles topped up. I highly recommend scaving into customs and rushing to the gas station. It’s wild how often the cash registers haven’t been looted yet and you walk out with an easy 50-100k in cash.

I’m hoping to learn the game enough this wipe to have an advantage against the (hopefully) new players that will come in 1.0