To be honest, if you haven’t played the game before you’re going to get repeatedly crushed in PvP – you’re better off starting off with the PvE (more like a trad MMO) part of the game first to get the hang of it. I don’t think that this is unique to GW: if you hop onto a public first-person-shooter-of-your-choice PvP server then you’ll probably get slapped about there too.

Since I already have the game, I don’t know whether you had access to PvE with a preview account. I expect they’ll do a PvE preview at some point in the next month or two – I’d try that for a “gentler” introduction to the game.