unique echo
I encountered this problem a few hours ago after being killed by an alpha wolf. The respawn timer did its normal count down to 0 after death, but never progressed any further, leaving me stuck on the 0 death screen.
I left the game loading for a few minutes, thinking maybe something was wonky with my connection. Unfortunately, nothing changed, and I had to close the game through Steam.
When I tried logging back in, I could maneuver through the character selection, the server selection (a private multiplayer one hosted by Nitrado), but from there the game became stuck in an infinite loading screen. I continued trying to log in for an hour. I left it loading for several minutes at a time. Nothing ever changed, and I didn’t seem to have a back up file to revert to, sadly.
I thought the character was toast at this point, but tried one final thing. I created a solo play server, logged in / out, and then tried logging back into the dedicated server. After about a minute of loading, I was finally able to log in. Hopefully this is able to help someone else having this problem.