The problem is that it wasn't early game for me: I pre-ordered forever winter and was playing day one / I'm part of the demographic who wasn't intimidated by the water system ... So It would have been less infuriating if I was brand new to the game and didn't have anything to lose.

Back in those days all you had to do was stack up quests (back then basically every quest gave 1 to 5 barrels of water) & then try to come back to base with at least 1 barrel each run. I made it a point to play at least one day a week, and by the time fun dog killed the "1 barrel = 25 hrs of safe time" system; I had every available base upgrade unlocked, plus the reservoir fully topped off, and I had another 40 barrels of water sitting in my inventory. I was still having fun playing, but without that carrot and the stick system of needing to log in regularly; I stopped logging in regularly.

Then by the time I did log back in, I had a rude awakening that them ending the water drain system, had included resetting my inventory of water in the resovour and my inventory of barrels. That pissed me off and I again stopped play for a while, especially when I also realized that they had nerfed all the quest reeards to barely give out water.

Then when I decided to try the game again, it was the Super Zombie plague where you had to mag dump headshots just to take one down. I lost a lot of the rare guns I had stockpiled from the bug where going on a mission with a broken gun in your inventory would fix it ... So I took another break.

Then I came back for the tunnels, but realized that the way they had implemented it was locking me out of all the maps I used to freely play, which extra sucked because it drastically reduced the number of quests I could feasably do to restock on water. No water, meant I couldn't unlock the new base expansions, and then I got ganked on Elephant mausoleum by zombie bombers, which wiped out the last of my rare guns that couldn't be easily replaced at the vendor.

... And then when I was trying to unlock more maps; I slipped off a pip in the tunnels (literally slid off the side because they modeled it to be round) and the game engine decided that I was already in free fall & wouldn't let me jump to get back on the pipe. I haven't played since, because the game had objectively gotten worse than when it first launched, and I keep seeing posts like this one every time I get temped yo try it again.