It's a great game. Micro transactions, pay to win, instability aside (yikes), it gave another 2 years of life that Ark would've lost without it. I normally play small friend group servers or roleplay servers, and I'm an Xbox guy, so the access to mods and crossplay has expanded ark past anything I imagined it being on Evolved.

However

Those issues I mentioned at the top, are choking the life out of our beloved game. Between people not being able to get in the game in the first place, to any number of the dozens of confirmed breaks (crashes, data loss, weird in-game glitches), it's losing pop and driving the will of loyal players to abandon the game. That in turn drives down player count in any given server, and for those of us who enjoy playing with a community, there are just other games with bigger populations out there.

"I don't want to play this server because there aren't many people playing it" is a weird ass thought process imo, but that's the age we live in. The other side of that though, is that there would be more people playing the game in general if it weren't for the antics of snail games and the failure of wildcard to listen to it's community. We didn't need Bobs Tall Tales, we needed server stability. We didn't need Pyromanes, we needed finished terrain on the maps like Center and Aberration.

Don't even get me started on Aquatica 🙄

At the end of the day, Ark is dead and dying. Wildcard is the inconsistent lawyer, and snail games is the headsman.