This is a significant problem this game has and will continue to have with player acquisition.
As the game changes from A16 to A17, you get zombies tearing through weaker material bases like butter....you get dog packs on day 5...you get sprinting night hordes which spawn and beeline to your spot at the time of their spawning...you get deaths at night followed by uselessness for 30m and more immediate deaths.
A new player is going to load up the game with default settings because they don't know any better. That new player is going to die to any one of those near-guaranteed events, and even if they manage to make a base, it'll be gone by day 8. That new player...is going to shut off the game, be angry they can't refund it, and spread bad word-of-mouth to make themselves feel better.
I second that! But this is still experimental. Hopefully someone will listen and tune things down a bit. That death penalty is extreme right now... What is it at now? 30 min? That's an awful long time to force a player to sit around.
OH! You forgot one thing... If they get infected and don't know about honey - nor use it 'in time' or can't and/or don't have any antibiotics... Stage 3 is like -5 Perception and Agility! That's way harsh! Level 81 day 26 stamina went from like 180 to 50... The 'staggering' of infection seems 'right' in that if you get infected you'll get worse and it'll take time to 'recover.' But the penalties are way harsh!
Lest us not forget about the flu and other things you can catch...
Builders like my wife who just want to build but want to have a little bit of fun with zeds have a hard time with obtaining resources... She tried turning off the zeds and there are no animals... Heck! Obtaining resources without iron tools is hard enough! Even if you have iron tools from the start, you don't have enough stamina in the beginning to be of any effect. Building a base is a bit confused because its hard enough to get enough resources to do anything, much less build a base... Recovery of resources has taken a nose dive.
In my single player I'm at day 32, level 98 or so. I started by taking over the oil refinery, not far away was the steel trailer and also the traitor. It wasn't till like level 60 or so that I was able to get a bunch of cobblestone to put a couple of layers around the steel trailer. I've given up on trying to find an auger! It looks like you can possibly get one by doing the quests from the traitor. I've still got one level 2 quest to do. Right now I've mined nodes exclusively since there isn't much down below and progress with iron tools is still slow. Going out to find those gravel patches and digging down there has proved fruitless... You have to build up some sort of defenses in order to do that... I just found one of those 'mine' poi's and built up some defenses for its concrete entrance, but that won't help if they dig strait down into it...
From my POV:
1.) Death penalty need to drop to like 10 minutes
2.) Resource recovery needs to be bumped up to at least 2X
3.) Zeds need to get a little bit dumber
4.) Bicycles and motor vehicles need a speed bump
5.) Zeds need to be scaled to player
6.) more from others and reserved lol