I've only played for about 9 hours total so, but I'd like to weigh in from the "fresh player" perspective. The constant ambushing by wolves (and occasionally other wildlife), regardless of where I'm at or what I'm doing, iced much of my will to keep playing. They show up regardless of if I'm out exploring or just gold panning at my house. More often than not, the first time I'd hear the wolf is when its already going in for the attack (if they are napping, they won't howl when the player enters the area). At that point it was basically too late to do anything. I'd already lost any possible terrain preparation advantage and would be dead in two very fast, startling hits. I couldn't even "pillar up", as some video guides suggested, as they always got the first hit off, knocking me down.
My frustration reached the point that that the only way I could keep playing was to use admin commands to teleport the 800 block distance back to my house, smite the wolves guarding my corpse with divine wrath, and purge their remains from existence before changing the gamemode back. It simply wasn't worth the time to trek back on foot and die repeatedly trying to recover my stuff since these encounters happened 1~2 times an hour. The RageQuit button earned it's name.
I really do enjoy the crafting, progression, and lore aspects, it's what kept me going despite taking 5 hours to locate my first clay deposit, or getting hopelessly massacred on the temporal storm and having to wait the rest of it out in the re-spawn prompt. I appreciate challenges that I can build up to overcome, but it didn't feel that anything I could do or make mattered. Instead of feeling like a hard fought encounter, it often just felt like a cheap loss. Maybe I could "get good" as the kids say with enough time, but I only get a handful of hours to spend on games after work and family responsibilities, usually on the weekends. I'm just an engineer, I love making stuff and solving problems. I just have to accept that the game is intended for a different audience.
Anyhow, it's currently 5AM and the sun is coming up, I should really get some sleep...
