Obvious and good way to gear up is to hit new/fresh restarted servers. I personally go by servers that show no population or 0 and it seems to work fairly well at predicting if the server just reset or not.
I see players who seem to INSTANTLY always know when a server has reset. For example I was in a school with friend when server reset and as soon as we log in, 4 guys load in with m4's and blew us away. They were not there before the server reset so they were on another server and just logged in somehow knowing our server reset.. How do they do this?