Recent reviews by Daes

Quite fun running around cramming shelves with stuff and quickly cashing out customers. My only gripe would be that there's no storage shelves, which means extra product needs to be on the ground.

It would be nice if the full release added decorations such as posters, wallpaper, signs, etc.

There are issues on balancing, dino types, and well, the concept that is tribes. Understandably, larger tribes will get more powerful, more quickly, then smaller tribes. However, once you have built up, you run the risk of inviting people who will dump/negate all of your work - which is mitigated to some extent with pins/tribe settings. But this leans the game towards several, medium-small tribes, which has it's own issues such as maintaining investments and building up with an alpha on the server.

As far as dinos, they are currently an insane time sink (forward loading the sink with kibble, or no), which can make losses incredibly devastating. These losses can range from bored alpha tribes, glitches, alpha dinos, or just general misfortune (such as getting shot down by an autoturret that's within a base getting rendered in). Not to mention that a tame can be killed (if you aren't careful/knowledgeable) hour(s) into a tame by wild spawns. The time sink has, in part, influenced the growth/propogation of unofficial servers - with custom rates, Ark can feel more like a casual video game than a second job.

Speaking of custom rates, the inherent balancing on official servers can be very... unpleasant. Building a 2x2x2 wood house can be rather time consuming on normal rates if done by hand - although done significantly faster if done by dino. However, that method has it's own risks as aforementioned. In essence, this makes can leave a bad taste in players mouths which causes them to stop playing (I had 5 new tribe members one week, and they all stopped playing within another). Furthermore, the gap between an established tribe and a new player is rather incredulous - it can lead to toxicity such as the established tribe abusing new players or upfront denial of play by way of foundation/pillar spamming. On the other hand, it can swing the other way with the established tribe being generous. However, the power difference is such that the average player has no hope of being competitive - with dinosaurs such as the giganotosaurus, quetzal, and mosasaur, a single tribe can easily overpower everything from the previous tier and below.

Overall, the experience can be pleasant if you find a good server with good rates, good fellow players to play with, and generally don't be a ♥♥♥♥. However, the game favors aggression and toxicity (e.g. being raided while you are offline), so it can be very inciting and depressing. While I have found my time spent worth it, I feel it would have been better spent playing a different game - the game has time sinks designed into basic play to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if 3/4 of my logged hours were spent afk. In fact, I did use Ark as a sleep aid sometimes - since some activities are time gated, but very useful, it was a reliable source of boredom. But until they fundamentally change number balancing (eg rates,dino stats, etc) and game mechanics (passive tames, lack of interaction during a tame), it isn't worth it to invest time into this game. It's basically a salt factory like LoL, unoptimized enough where minecraft would be better, and generally as fun as watching paint dry at times.