Game in current (and ever?) state is just heaven for griefers, as always condomed by statements as "wasteland is harsh".
The best thing you can do about it is to give developers time and chance to make it more enjoyable.
Creating own server is possible as well, but with ugly limitation of windows-only binaries.
Ofcourse I seriously doubt anyone working on project has enough experiences with computer games design, so in fact resulting product is just continuing experiment. Some might find fun, some might not.
Obviously current design of mercenaries, death penalty, pvp, player interaction, questing, character creation and perhaps even economy are sloppy at the best.
Game completly fails to moderate rate between played time and personal gain. This would be perfectly fine for either payed service or sponsored service in fashion of various web-based games driven by only player attention.
I'm not analyst to tell or have rights to guess whose fault it is, however there're still hundreds happy ones so that game is not really a failure at all.