You say you played right? Wrong. You should've killed the cows first. Turn-based, beat them to death with the hands god gave you, hit and run two or three encounters and you're done. If you don't have enough AP, make a spear or two. Throw it and run away in RT, wait for AP to regenerate, run up to it, pick up, rinse-repeat. You'll actually learn something about killing things that melee in this game. Set up your tent. Fast forward a few days and you have more low level stuff than you could possibly ever use.
Now, from your account, I can see that you made a few fatal mistakes. See, you didn't "play right". You kept screwing up, and each mistake contributed to the end result, ie. you lying dead on the ground and some asshole taking a dump on you. Let's elaborate on what you did wrong:
a) wrong priorities; you didn't get the tent first, you lost everything because you died
b) because of having too much stuff on you, you were a target for thieves
c) you didn't put the most precious thing you had, ie. brahmin skins, into an item slot... probably because you had other stuff you didn't want stolen from you
d) you allowed a guy to follow you and steal from you
e) due to you being angry with your fuckup, you didn't rationally asses the situation and got into a fight you had low chance of concluding in your favor because:
- you couldn't kill him in reasonably few strikes
- even if you killed him, you'd kill him on grid and there's a high chance you wouldn't pick your stuff up
... obviously, being a succesful thief he was lvl 21 on bluesuit, a fact you didn't recognize
f) due to assessing the situation wrongly, you didn't retreat from the map in an area that's basically a PK hunting ground
g) you got killed - nothing wrong here except for the fact that you still could've ran if your reflexes were good enough and you weren't surprised.
See how each mistake leads to the next, more severe one? Basically, a silly thing and less than obvious lapse of judgement escalated into having to start from scratch because you couldn't keep your cool, withdraw and do the farming again. You felt lucky, you took a risk, you died. But the fact stands that you could've pulled out at any time.
But that's not the problem. The problem is you didn't take your time to analyse the situation and do it right the next time around. You just assumed that you were right and the game was wrong, you didn't learn from your mistakes. That's just the worst attitude possible if you want to succeed in this game. Try seeing beyond the items lost, because for a newbie, each death is not really a failure - it's an opportunity to gain knowledge on how to do shit right. Honestly, 9 out of 10 non-TC related player deaths on this server could easily be avoided with proper techniques/tactics, with the remaining 10% being simply massive amounts of bad luck. Once you accept the fact that you're not perfect and start trying to adapt, you'll see your survival rates increasing. Good luck.
Oh, and this thing about it being impossible to climb up in the "social structure" of the server? Wrong again, back when I started it was way worse and I'm leading a well recognized and feared gang right now along with a friend I started playing with... and there's a lot of people who started before or after me and managed to make a name for themselves.