What I meant was....is the game populated by 12 year old griefers...
There are annoying hackers who change the game. This is obviously not the intent of the game makers. However, what is unquestionably within their intent is to allow players to kill each other or work with each other in whatever way they like (or don't like). It seems to me that a lot of people cry about getting killed by other players, but once you learn the game, there is really no other threat than humans, so to cry about it is silly. You work a long time to collect stuff in this game, so it does sting when you lose several days worth of looting to someone you never even saw, but that also makes it more worthwhile when you find someone good to play with, or someone good to kill.
Sometimes people group up with the best intentions, but the group breaks down due to whatever and everybody just ends up killing each other. There is a lot of distrust between players in the game, and I think that is the best part of the simulation. Think about what it would really be like to survive and apocalypse; this game comes pretty close I think.
There is not a lot of profit in staying on the coast, so there are not many people I have encountered who go there just to kill new spawning players with nothing, so it's not grief like some games where you get killed repeatedly in a spawn area and never really get to play.