any duders currently playing this game by any chance. would be fun to learn it alongside other folks and perhaps form a tribe.

@roland_leshaft: I'm kinda interested to pick it up. I have a question tho- Is it possible to play the game in third person (all the time)?

My wife gets motion sickness from first person games, third person camera helps alot...

Anyone still checking this? I need some folks to play with, too.

Can't believe more duders aren't playing this.

I just started playing on sever 59 mostly. Where are you guys?

I just picked it up. I'd like to play with people as playing by yourself doesn't seem like the way to go

I'm really in to the game and a private GB server would be great but the price per month is pretty expensive for a official server.

Out of context, the phrase, "anyone interested in starting a tribe?" Is incredibly creepy.

@ravelle: how much is it?

It starts at 40 dollars a month.

@ravelle: Not gonna lie, if there was enough interest, say, 40 people willing to do this, I'd gladly pitch in some money to have a private GB server.

I'm all for it but I expected the game to be a bit more popular here.

I might be convinced to get in on this. Especially if the server cost was split; I'd hate to see someone have to pay the full brunt of it. Plus this game looks hella goofy and fun. The UPF was pretty awesome. And... I like the idea that there're consequences for punching a tree with your fist to cut it down.

The UPF wasn't really selling it though, the game has so much to offer and the crew's idea of "just another early access survival game" wasn't really fair with their shallow look at it, although somewhat understandable.

I watched some of the more popular video for ARK and it looked really cool - but they were all edited down to choice bits.

I read up on the game and watched some unedited video and found out that what I wasn't seeing in popular YouTube video edited down to 20 minutes of cool stuff was hours, upon hours, upon hours of resource collection and tedious management of not only your own condition (food, water) but that of your dinosaurs as well if you ever actually get the point of training them.

Apparently many of the bigger dinosaurs take like 4+ hours of real time to "train", which involves drag/dropping food into them like they're a container and watching a progress bar fill up - and this isn't a process you can leave and pick up again.

The game seems downright impossible to get anything out of without a fairly sizable support network of other players.

I now understand the popularity of game streamers and a generation of kids that watch video games instead of play them. An average person would never get anything from this game. You need to be committed to playing it like 4+ hours a day and have a bunch of people to support you. For the few who can manage that, you can make some pretty cool stuff in this sandbox. So I understand why you'd want to watch an edited down 20 minute video instead of play 100 hours, 90 of them mind-numbingly tedious, to see the same content.

What strikes me though, is how "artificial" the grind is. I.e. why build the resource economy such that it takes that much time to do anything cool? If they were building an MMO with a monthly subscription I'd get that they want to leech as much life and time out of people as possible - but for a one time priced game, I don't get it - unless it's purely to keep people in the game long enough so that the community is large enough to attract more players. At some point however, the tedium:cool stuff ratio exceeds what most people are willing to tolerate and they'll start bleeding players anyway, right?

I'm on a local server with a bunch of friends and we we're building a pretty big fortress with only three people, it really doesn't take that long. Collecting resources isn't that bad with the right amount of tools and dino's. You don't need oceans of time and 40 people to enjoy the game at all.

We're 6 players in total and even then we're having a blast with the game, we're just building our things and goofing around. Even with the limited time we spent on a local server.

I'm assuming that interest died here? I've played a bit and the time commitment is vastly reduced when working with a tribe. Also with cooking and "prime" meats you can reduce the work further. I'd be interested in joining other duders. If not on a private server than feel free to PM me and invite me to your server.

@choi: You can toggle between first/third person by scrolling the mouse wheel, I haven't found anytime that it forces me to use either view. Me and some friends setup our own server to play on, when running the server you have the option to disable third person view. So it looks like as long as the option is not disabled by the server admin you shouldn't have any problems. I don not know what the stance is currently on official servers. Most people I know have been playing on unofficial servers.

Anyone still interesting in playing this game? Hit me up!