Ark Survival is on sale on Steam for only $24.99. Definitely worth the money. With all the server customization it may be worth getting and hosting a server depending on the interest. You can add and remove blueprints and engrams that people can get as well as customize dinosaur difficulty, player and dinosaur damage, maps eventually, and a plethora of other things. If we did host a server it would probably be more like a random server without a lot of rules or restrictions meaning if someone in XoO kills you then that is just tough love but we can discuss what everyone likes and go with that.
lol, yes that would be fair. Again I want to reiterate that the rules etc would be decided by everyone before release. I would also need to find someone to run the server as I know I want to stay far far far away from server admin as possible. Perhaps @Que or @EniGmA1987 may be interested.
I would recommend against a private server. From looking at the list they seem very dead, or overloaded with whoever outfit/guild owns it. IMO getting everyone on an official server is the way to go, for more competition.
There's no way we will ever be able to populate an official server with all of our XoO members. They are just too busy. Hosting our own private server has its bonuses, no admin abuse, stupid rules, etc but they got a lot. I think they are around 1$ per slot which if you have a good server and people want to join you will want to have the max slots. 70$ a month is not something to scoff at. Crashing someone else's private server is probably the best idea right now. Find one with a decent pop and just go at it. Possibly whenever someone posts a "new server" post on ARK or Reddit forums we jump on that and get in on an even level. Make sure they don't allow downloading and its game on. With all the patches and development(1 year in EA) spending more money on the game is probably not a good idea.
At home I cannot run servers anymore, though I wish I could as I had a good time hosting the Minecraft server for a couple years. I do have a very good fiber connection at work though, so Ill look into getting a computer together capable of hosting a server that I could set up there. As it would be just for running a server and I have lots of spare hardware, most likely it will have either a Ivy Bridge quad clocked at 4.5GHz, or an FX-8350 clocked at 5.4GHz along with 8GB of RAM and a SSD. That hardware on a fiber connection should be able to get us as many player slots as we would ever want.
for far the game is quite good and the game has considerably more updates that most other games out there and you can see the developers fixing things. Like I stated when the game released I didn't purchase it for the same reason - bad reviews. But they have come a long way. The biggest issue right now they are dealing with is base raiding (like most survival games). So far they have added a variety of features to help alleviate this problem. As of now I would recommend the game even if just for single player. I will see if Enigma can get something going I guess for now. I just want to make sure the time we spend isn't negated by a spiteful admin and that we can get experience the enjoyment of the server configuration availability.
Also I don't mind helping with the server. Don't think I can drop $80 a month but can at least help offset the cost a bit.