Why ARK: Survival Evolved is the worst game in the world.

General issues:
Have you ever wondered how good your PC is? Well for a small investment of $65 AUD and a small investment of $45 AUD for each subsequent DLC which allow you to play the game properly, you can now benchmark your system.
Step 0: Download Ark + DLCs (optional but not really) on an SSD (optional but not really) which will cost you approximately 3 business days and 650 gigabytes
Step 1: click on servers.
Step 2: join an official island server.
Step 3: navigate your way to within a 50km range of Ice Cave.
Step 4: if you get above 15fps, your PC is well suited to run ark, and you probably spent too much money on it.
If you bought ARK for an immersive experience combined with a hardcore PVP experience, you have been lied to and should prepare to get shafted as the devs are f*cking braindead. Somehow managing to create neither, and through sheer ret@rdation created a game which crashes due to being open, and naturally has the worst desync possible due to all server hosting performed on a $30 toaster. If your PC cost <$4000 to assemble or you use an alienware assembled PC, do not expect to be able to play this game on >20 fps with constant stutters on lowest graphics, overclocking, and INI enabled. The minimum requirements on the ark store page are described as: NVIDIA GTX 670 , Intel I5, and 8gb ram, but they are lying to you and you will not actually get past the steam library, let alone reach the game settings, which is necessary to mute 'main menu music' before it causes irreparable ear damage to all who wish to launch the game. Hence, it is recommended to place your headphones outside, surrounded by pillows, with all doors and windows shut before attempting to open ark for the first time, and after any subsequent redownloads following the clearing of ssd space necessary to download other games. If all these obstacles are overcome and your game hours accidently exceeded 2 hours, you will then proceed to either Official or Unofficial where your will commence your rapid loss of braincells.

Official:
After spending >1700 hours playing this abomination which some may call a game, i can safely say that the official ark experience is comparable to running a marathon on legos. The sheer inability to play the game due to an agglomeration of trash servers which constantly lag and crash, obvious cheaters which don't get punished because the entire ark team are composed of pay check stealers, and servers which don't wipe, completely disable the average human from being able to waste enough braincells on this game to progress past stone hatchet. As an Australian player, it is difficult to find servers at all, let alone servers which function, have players, have less than 50% of the pop as cheaters, and have <300 ping which would enable us to shoot arrows out of a crossbow without having arrows frequently stuck in the chamber. Due to a lack of server wipes on ark official, it has become quite challenging to build a base or pvp for most players, and whilst the 20 remaining tryhard oce players no life this game for an eternal ego contest, blowing through stone bases with 2k dura tek armor, and covering 75% of the map in spam to 'defend their home server', the casual player is eradicated. It quickly becomes apparent that Ark official is not for mere mortals, but for the pure degenerates which can invest 12 hours a day playtime and know 5 people that are capable of the same. So why not move to official they say?

Unofficial:
Have commitments outside of video games? Tired of spending 3 hours taming a lvl 50 pteranadon which will die to a guy with a capped fabi and tek regardless? Tired of being unable to build anywhere as Ark Servers have not wiped since launch? Don't know 5 other degenerates willing to play ARK? Tired of non-moderated servers where cheaters have unsanctioned residency? Unofficial is for you! Here we offer a wide range of amenities, such as:
1. Dead servers! Because nobody plays this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game, especially in OCE where there are approximately 40 players across 2 clusters which avoid sunlight as they thirst for the experience of wasting their hours on ARK.
2. The ability to play ARK casually! Just kidding! No person without degenerate friends and an obnoxious amount of free time can seriously compete against players who live and breath ark, spending days on end minmaxing their dino lines to wipe all the casual non-loser players off their already dead servers.
3. 5x rates means 5x easier??? Contrary to popular belief, '5x' written in unofficial server names does not actually represent 5x rates, it actually means that the tryhard ARK players which do not sleep have 5x more sh!t than you, and get 5x more loot from your trash base after soaking all your turrets with their 5x hp turtles.
4. At least you can build a base! I mean i guess, but then you are simply more ret@rded than the tryhard players which will wipe you anyway, and if any human does a cost-benefit analysis of building a base on unofficial, they will see an obvious trend where there is actually no benefit, and the cost scales with amount of playtime invested into a particular server, resulting in a net negative relationship, leading you to question, why play PVP at all?

PVE
Now you may be wondering, if there are no players on official and no players on unoffical, where does the concurrent ark playerbase come from? Crazy as it may sound, ARK is a scam, and the advertisement of ARK as an MMO PVP game is a blatant lie, as the wildcard marketing team gaslight people into believing that ARK is a PVP game with a substantial player base, but in reality, people are tired of the cyclical nature associated with getting raided and rebuilding on ark PVP servers. However, PVE servers may be the light at the end of the tunnel for ARK Survival Evolved, single-handedly carrying the ARK player count on steamcharts from 300 to ~40,000, but this only underscores the cancerous nature of attempting to play ark PVP, commonly resulting in PTSD, suicidal tendencies, and broken gaming peripherals. And if you are anything like myself, a casual gamer looking for an authentic and enjoyable PVP experience, your will arrive at the inevitable conclusion that this game is not worth playing.

TLDR: through a short summation of a few of ARK: Survival Evolved's issue, it would be preferrable for any human to commit suicide rather than spend >= 2 hours on this trash game.