Book, I completely agree. I wouldn't buy your game either

one issue that has been at the forefront of my brief time in this community has been that the design issues have been very short on specifics. The current implementation is an example of where it seems fairly obvious that the devs are firing from the hip and trying to implement something cool and necessary but really haven't looked at it from a gamers point of view...

Lets just look at the design from a functional standpoint.

1. Build up a homestead/tribal area. A new player is goingto plant a totem pretty close to where they pop into the world...they need to get their feet under them, learn mechanics, etc. a new player is NOT going to trek for an hour into the wilderness to plop down their first totem.
Common sense moment: Areas surrounding the lake should have decent levels of basic (non-rare) resources. That there are variations of 'common' resources based upon geography is great...but they should be present nonetheless.
Duh moment: We want the players not to say, 'wtf this is bs' when they realize they can't do/get half the stuff they need to do something. They are new. They aren't going to feel comfortable trading. New players need to be self sufficient at a basic level.

2. Resource : Totem proximity. This is a great concept for competetive areas. This is a great concept for determine tribal influence. THis is horrible implementation for areas that are, or have the capeability to be, populated heavily by totems....horrible implimentation simply because much of the current prelude land is bumper to bumper totems...so by coding it in the manner that was, a huge portion of land is now wasteland/devoid of resource...this would be a '..have you actually played your game?' moment.

3. Rare resource implementation. Because of 1 and 2 being so borked, i can't really comment here, and this gets my opinion pretty pvp/conflict centric and thus heavily divisive in this community...so i will refrain

4. Introduction of more land area without co introduction of either satellite totems or 'freight'....so...we're supposed to run for an hour, not get killed, scavenge etc, and suicide/run back, wash rinse repeat? or we're supposed to abandon the areas we've been building up for the past several months? I'm really kind of scratching my head at this one. Why would we increase land mass without introducing some form of expansion totem of travel ability to deal with the extra distance? THis is a 'duh' moment.

see book? design issues with no mention of pvp centricism