Having fairly recently created my character on siege myself (i've only been on siege for what, 2 months now?) here are some big things i noticed that were...offputting..while starting a new character. (remember, new characters don't have tens of millions here, we can't just buy up enough points in SoT's to get up higher at the start)
1. RoT starts way too early, at 70 skill you still have a hard time even hitting a creature like a lizardman or an orc. Most templates need at least 4 skills to be effective (warrior = weapon + anat + tactics + healing, tamer = taming + vet + lore + magery/healing). So in reality, even at 70 skill, you can only gain around 1.2-1.3 points to each skill a day. This more or less means, first thing players have to do when joining the server, is grind orcs for a week or two just to get to the skill level to kill monsters like solen, ogres, etc.
2. NPC's don't buy items. I know this is a long running feature of siege, but lets face it, nobody is making even a reasonable amount of money looting orcs and ogres and selling the stuff to the npc blacksmith for 50 gold a piece. Personally I think it's silly, new players need a form of income that works on any monster, not just one that drops gold, especially with the increased prices on npc's
3. Soulstones, I already had quite a few of them and would KILL to be able to have them here instead of on the shard I no longer play. I understand not being able to do a full char transfer with skills and all bank items, but it would be cool if we could use an account transfer token to move over a character with no skills and all their account bound soulstones. Hell, the only reason I re-activated this account and not my older one (though only about 6 months different), is this one had 2 unclaimed vet rewards and I had already claimed them all on my old main account.
4. Housing - not for me but i could see this being an issue, my houses had all collapsed long ago (a few keeps and 18x18s, loaded with artys and most had their roof paved with 1mil gold checks, they were a nice find for someone). A lot of things have been suggested (larger bank boxes, 5 day decay "old style" housing, etc..) but it is an issue in cross-sharding and does hold back people who otherwise might actually want to play here.
One thing i think everyone can agree on though, siege really does need to be added onto the shard list already, it annoyed me personally lately, I tried to get a few friends into the game using old cd keys I owned. (I had wayyyy too many UO accounts back in the day..) and one of them, an AOS key, was actually unused. To get onto siege, we had to create the account, pick a different shard, go through the full character creation, spawn in new haven, say "I revoke my young player status", log out in an inn, find siege on the list, and go through the character creation again :/