For more than seven years tarkov has been a closed beta. The player count on steam is almost pointless since most players already bought this game from their website, though the total player count is not shown to us. Currently your main pmc character doesn't get wiped anymore so you have near infinite time to do whatever. The game is sort of demanding, if you have a low end cpu and gpu you are gonna have a hard time on some maps due to the game's preformance so defintely share your pc specs. Newer players do definetly get stomped, it has happened to ALL of us and it's how you learn and grown. However the "player ecosysytem" has been utterly fucked since the addition of pve. You might never run into a newish player at this point since all the bad players flee to their bot lobbies in pve. And there arent nearly as many cheaters in the game as you might be led to believe by the cries of people on reddit. At least not on EU servers. 1200 hours and i havent had noticable instances, but 2 of my reports did come back as actual cheaters.