As an actual new player who came into this game with no preconceptions (albeit a dedication to open source software, and some development experience), I agree with those saying the learning curve is impossibly steep for new players.

My personal experience has been as follows:

The tutorial was fairly generous with Tria, and also gave me a shortsword as a quest reward. Once I got out, I was ready to go and get some sword training and start becoming a warrior. Oops... I have no idea where a sword trainer is. After asking around, I did find the sword trainer, and trained sword. I also bought a longsword, and spent most of my tria thinking it would be easy to make that much back (i mean, if the tutorial gave me 4200 or so...).

Boy was I wrong.

With a short sword in one hand, a longsword in the other, I was able to kill one eyed rats with ease. Diseased rats, clackers, and virtually every other mob except one-eyed rats were absolutely unhittable, and even in bloody stance I could not penetrate them. No matter. After a couple hours killing rats, I had made a couple thousand trias, trained another level of swords, but was doing LESS damage per hit. I looked into the problem, and found my swords were diminishing rapidly in quality. Damn...

I thought I might repair them... nope, even with a couple points in repair weapons (after buying some clubs and working on them) I still can't repair them, and merchants don't offer a repair service (why the hell can't Harnquist fix my sword for me?). Even if I were to run around asking players to fix my stuff for me, most new players will get turned off by being so helpless. So now as a brand new player, I've sunk all my money into training swords, I can't make money fast enough to replace the swords, and lack the skill to repair the sword the tutorial gave me (think about how bad that is in terms of game design...). In other words, I'm losing money by hunting, and actually my damage keeps going down as my sword's durability declines.

Any sane player would give up at this point, as nothing has instructed them to get magic, the only thing that I can kill is rats who don't even drop enough tria to train my weapon repair skill, and still I have to spend money and levels repairing clubs to level up that skill just so I can sustain my sword training!

The only reason I got past the first two hours of play is by reading a guild website full of spoilers that directed me to kill Kikiri, which drop feathers and meat at a much higher rate (and resell value) than rats. Even then, I had to run from Oja to Hydlaa to train, as my weapon level is too low to get training in Oja.

So let's make a list.
1) Tutorial gives me a choice of weapons that decay within the first two hours of gameplay.
2) There's no way a newbie could repair those weapons, or afford the training to learn how to repair those weapons based upon what they are capable of hunting.
3) Even with the tria given by the tutorial, most newbies will blow it buying weapons and armor rather than training clubs or unarmed (the only viable newbie weapon skills)
4) There are only two mobs for newbies to grind, and one of them is in a higher level city (Oja), and the other doesn't drop enough tria to allow them to train and repair their weapons (Rats).
5) The quests and process of learning magic are too convoluted for new players.
6) I decided to try and make some money for crafting. With 1 rank in mining, I unearthed 8 iron ore in one hour of digging. Looking over my chat log, I had one successful dig for every 12-14 unsuccessful digs (and this is a nice sample size). You think a noob is going to stand there all day digging iron with that kind of success rate?

In short, no sane player would stick with this game for more than a few hours. Most newbies don't want to run around begging for help. Most expect there to be a gradual increase in difficulty as they progress, but to be hit with absurd difficulty and impossible progression right of the bat is bad design.

Fixes:
1) Why is mining so hard? The crappy stuff like coal and iron should be relatively easy for newbs, while the higher level ores should be difficult even for the most trained miner. It makes absolutely no sense.
2) Why do newbie weapons decay so fast, and why is weapon repair so difficult and expensive?  Give Harnquist an option to repair weapons for a rate affordable by a newbie.
3) Why be so stingy with giving tria to new players? Why not up the number of drops, or value of drops for One-eyed rats? The only people killing them are new players, and new players currently can only kill ONE MOB IN THE ENTIRE GAME unless they run to Oja.

I mean, if you like having less than 100 people per server, leave it how it is. Only the tiniest minority of people are sticking with this game beyond a few hours.