So how do you fix a game with an excellent conceit and poor execution? I think there are 2 main ways-- one is a rework and the other is an addition. 

So let's say the games' systems are inflexible. It is what it is. How do you resolve the learning curve and the lack of of a sustainable social system? My solution to this is a retirement period following the first hour. You age into an elder and you can either take the death and start a new life or enter "retirement". I think in this phase you are no longer able to use tools or craft object, but merely carry/hold objects and act socially.

OHOL at this time has this poorly implemented/half working mayorial/king system wherein a central leader can issue edicts about what their followers should do that everyone can see/hear regardless of their physical location. Unfortunately, even this is wrought with poorly communicated ideas. You have to say "I follow Firstname Lastname" of the user in question in chat. It's purely opt-in. So let's change it to all people occupying a towns "territory" are automatically opted into this mayorial edict system. Now, retired elders are elgible to be the mayor for up to one additional hour, at which time they die no matter what. 

This gives the town a few extra hands, a central voice/leader that can be passed on, and a straight up management role/job that can be trained and understood by subsequent generations. This eliminates the "what do I do" portion of the new players' experience, and also creates an aspirational goal for some types of players. 

I don't believe this eliminates the overall gameplay deficits exhibited by the rest of the systems in the game, and the first hour is still going to be spent toiling in frustration with the mechanics, but at least now you have a group of aged players to communicate with. They can act as mentors, quest givers, resource gatherers etc. A whole group of players there to enjoy the works of their youth and to direct the future of the village before their time is up. 

The second idea is a different game, almost completely. So it's less of a re-work than taking the kernel of the idea and expanding on it in a different direction. 

We'll just call this game One Life. Here's the basic outline of how it functions:

As it stands right now, actual buildings in OHOL are useless to the point where most towns will only have two reall structures. A baking area/storage/campfire for mothers/children, and possibly a smaller storage room or blacksmith area. 

Well, now homes are important. If the idea is to develop a society, one of your first tasks upon coming of age is to build a home. So let's start with the chicken and move to the egg. 

Your life is now 6 hours from the point of your birth.  If you're born at 6pm, your death is at 12am, regardless of how much you play. Take a break, come back, as long as it's within 6 hours you play the same person. This slows down the age progression into periods rather than immediate transitions. 

You've just passed your first hour, and you are now in the young adult period and can reproduce. This is no longer an instantaneous and uncontrollable event. If you're born as a woman, you won't suddenly have a kid while you're carrying a basket of fertilizer back from the swampland without any warning. To reproduce, you need both a house and a partner. This gives you an immediate two-fold goal upon starting a game, and we can even extend this to three. You need a place to build your room in the town, and a social goal of meeting another player who will continue your lineages together. I think this will also benefit the parent/child relationship in the game as it exists already. They will need to help you build/or pay for your first house on land in the town. Importantly, this also puts you in a position where you may fail to reproduce if the town isn't big enough or there aren't enough people to partner up with. 

The game right now has this half implemented gene ranking system, where people who do more work and have more children get more points which in turn allows them to learn more tools/jobs in each life. This rank carries over from game to game and also acts as something of a leaderboard. This remains and is expanded. If there's no one in your village left to partner with, you're going to have to travel to a nearby village for this purpose. Because of this, we're also drastically reducing the size of the map. OHOL currently has a world map that the creator said is 30k the size of earth. It would take 34 real world years to traverse it. This is absurd for a number of reason. 

A game like this can use procedural generation for terrain, sure, but why?

My idea is to take the world map and make it roughly 4 hours of travel across in each cardinal direction. Each quadrant contains a special resource or resources that the other 3 quadrants do not have. This encourages the development and maintenance of trade routes and highways. Just for the sake of illustration here, Q1 contains oil, but has no iron, while Q2 has iron but no gold. You get the idea. Now with a smaller map and longer lifetimes, you can easily move on from your own homeland and go onto a new one in order to trade or build a family to increase your own rank/continue your lineage. Each family can still rapidly produce children in order to make sure you're able to play whenever you want.

Eves now spawn with an Adam, for the sake of continuity, which not only helps the immense failure rate of Eve players, but encourages co-operation and social/role playing from moment one. Survival mechanics are dramtically tuned down, where food is required, but instead of needing to eat every 45 seconds in game, we can extend that out to ten of minutes. This allows you to actually have time to communicate ideas to other players more effectively. As well, adults are no longer limited to 15 characters for speech. You can read chat of anyone who lives within your towns' borders. 

Adam/Eves spawn initially around the origin point of the map, but as time goes on they can go further and further towards world border. If the game continues to grow, expansion around the outer edges can easily be acheived without disrupting communities that already exist. In fact, it may eventually be required if resources aren't properly maintained towards the center of the map. 

This quadrant style gameplay not only encourages co-operation, but threat. Right now, in game, if your family comes across another family from elsewhere, their chat is scrambled. You can't understand them. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes this results in violence due to lack of communication. I was born once into a small migrant family and after trying to assimilate with a town we couldn't understand, we were eventually all hunted and killed. 

While this is clever in theory, and can lead to some emergent gameplay, there's no way right now to ever fully work your way into another village. You can't "learn" the language, and even your kids will speak the same gibberish to everyone already living there. Let's remove this feature for now, while we work out the rest of the gameplay in a little bit.