Admitted extraction shooter hater tries Arc Raiders

As the title says, I have always been a hater of extraction shooters. That one time Division 2 made me go into the loot extraction zone for a main quest, I rage quit. I'm also not a fan of PvP at all... I stopped advancing in Dune: Awakening right before you have to go out into the big free-for-all PvPvE zone.

So it's unsurprising that I fully expected to hate Arc Raiders... but because it's from Embark, I decided to at least give it a try.

I think I've spent about 10 hours so far. I realize this makes me an infant in game time, but I wanted to share my first impressions early, especially if people have advice on how I should proceed.

The tutorial was a lot of fun. You immediately get a sense of the scale and how being topside is supposed to feel risky at all times. I sprinted like the tutorial said and that immediately set off alarms.

The first trip out into the dam area was quick and fun. I unlocked some stuff, got some quests. I went out again and was brutally murdered by a pair of ARC drones. Next time, I was brutally murdered by another player. They even closed the doors before they knocked me out, I'm guessing so the drones wouldn't hear him looting my dead body.

In the next 4 runs out, twice I was murdered by the ARC drones and twice more by players. One of them even did the "hey, don't shoot!" and then shot me.

Character is level 6 and I've got two different "kill this thing" quests with overlapping requirements, and then the quest to blow up ARC stuff with grenades. I have spent the past 2 hours trying to find a single ARC thing that I could even come close to hitting with a grenade. It certainly doesn't work on the drones (and when they fall, they're dead before a grenade will do any good).

The gratuitous PvP murder is annoying, but it's part of the game. I now plan my topside trips by just heading in a straight line for the nearest exit, and I just loot what I can find around the exit. I'm too paranoid to venture further. For new areas, I just grab a free loadout and Leroy Jenkins into the center so I can get the lay of the land. Once I know where I'm going, then I use a real loadout.

Current problems: I can't find the turrets and whatever else I need to kill for the quests, nor can I find a single ARC that seems vulnerable to a grenade. Even the rolling balls don't work, as I either kill them with a bullet or they steamroll me in a suicide run.

So, as a solo who would prefer to just stay out of people's way while doing quests, I'm not sure if I'm doing things "right". And I don't know how to find things like certain enemy types or the field depots, etc. The field depots don't seem to show up on my map until I'm standing on one.

It remains to be seen if the PvP kills will frustrate me enough to make me reconsider the game. At the moment they aren't.