I honestly really enjoyed the 4 hours that I was able to play the first night I bought the game.
I was NOT happy to learn that this game would require me to dig around in my PC, change settings I'm not familiar with within my BIOS, and set up Boot stuff JUST to play the game that I paid $75 to play.

When I buy a game, I expect to be able to SIMPLY press Play and it PLAY. Whatever the game needs, should be taken care of before I pay for it, do not make paying customers dig into important system details in order to play. Its confusing, it feels risky, and in near 30 years of gaming I have NEVER had to do that for ANY game I've ever purchased. Ever.
Anyway, I was careful and that worked out good. I got several hours of enjoyable gameplay that night. That first night, was the only night it played right for.

Today, not even 24hrs into owning the game, I get on after work, and the gameplay is running smooth, -then insta crashes out randomly in the middle of a Gauntlet match I'm working towards for a challenge. I get back into another match, and it crashes about 5 minutes into that one. The third match I get into, it crashes right at the end. During all of the gameplay its running smooth and proper, no sign of issue. When it crashes, there's no information on the crash or any crash report pop up, nothing.

I double check all my device drivers, Win11 update info, at this point I've verified the game files twice, and there would be a third time before I called it quits. Because after those crashes, it would eventually just quit launching from Steam outright, it would get to the Anti-cheat splash screen then just stop running before the game screen could come up.
At this point, I've spent hours upon hours looking through the internet to seeing people claim "Go dig around in the BIOS again" or "Go dig around in your Windows Security here and enable this, bypass that, do this, and with a little rain dance maybe this will work". I see people claim "Add this command line into your Steam to launch it this way".

The most frustrating part of it all is, I really enjoyed the short time I got to spend on it, and I was looking forward to breaking it in this weekend and trying the rest of the classes I didn't get to.

Instead, I had to refund it for it not being functional less than 24 hrs after purchase, and I am just done trying to manipulate something that is simply NOT user friendly, like the hundreds of other games I own and the thousands of other hours I've enjoyed on them.

I'd love to see this game become just as NORMAL as all the other games I buy, and PLAY when press play. Should that happen, I will repurchase it. But until then, I'm just stuck not being able to enjoy it. And its frustrating.

I usually love early access survival games, and generally give em time to adjust. But in this case I requested a refund. If this really launched in 2016, then I dont understand how the "normal" difficulty can be so one sided on the ratio of plant growth (for fiber harvesting) vs the overwhelming spawn numbers for predatory animals in every direction that aggro to you upon rendering distance yet never aggro to each other, though they would never realistically "not" aggro to each other, and are entirely too close to one another not to fight. You get 2 plants per sq mile for fiber, 1 fiber each. You need 10 plants to make a bow. Youre in a wooded prarie type area, and theres only .02% of all available plants around you thats harvestable for fiber. Legit like every 30 or so plants you walk across, only 1 of them is fiber giving. Theres 6 predatory animals within a 200 yard radius of your character at all times, regardless the direction you run. Axe's do not seem to damage the animals at all. You get 2 shot by any animal. Its impossible to build a bow to defend yourself on "Normal" difficulty without dying and losing what you did find. All of this could be avoided if the multitude of plants around you supplied fiber, instead of the manipulated single plant that is rarer than a tulip in a desert being the only source of fiber. If I EVER would have got a bow made, each arrow requires "nails" by the way. So theres that. I dont know how the Natives ever survived in North America without "nails" for their arrows. Not rock fragments / flint, sticks and cordage or something historically accurate like that. Manipulated resource difficulty is too obvious and too present in game. Too much "artificial difficulty" blots out the rest of the game, which doesnt seem bad otherwise. You can tell a LOT of work went into the game, yet at the same time its insane to think that the crafting requirements manipulation and resource/predator spawn ratio was thought healthy enough to leave as is for 4 1/2 years.