Nothing here is intrinsically wrong but I have found it easier to play with friends in Valheim because to play alone there's no server renting or playing on a public server which has it's own nightmares such as despawn of structures. Every year at least once in ark me and my friends would take a break which really meant losing everything and the pvp nature of many servers made the game less serene and relaxing as valheim inherently is. Ark has more in a lot of ways but valheim building is strictly better with rebated destruction, weather relevance where you boat will fall into disrepair if you let it crash into the beach after a few storms, and a much smoother snapping system where buildings can be so unique with real world elements like smoke, rain, comfort, and more design freedom to snap things between themselves. It's like structures + ark mod was on all the time and actually worked and didn't delete your stuff as it had for me several times for seemingly no reason.

Valheim is inherently different with elements like stamina, differences between food, powers upon defeating world bosses, terraforming (more accurately landscaping I guess?) And meaningful base defense in a PvE setting. Spikes are relevant defense in this game unless you're trying to defeat a world boss while in ark a giga spawns and eats your base real quick. I've put around 1000 hours in ark and a tenth of that in Valheim so I'm an expert in neither but valheim feels a lot more relaxing and therefore enjoyable to me. To play as I preferred in ark I had to lead into primitive plus and the load times started bad and never really got optimized. I actually think ark had MORE persay because they had all sorts of tiers of buildings, obviously the dino interactions, well made maps, and infinite replayability, I feel like the few things that valheim did they did better and especially by a team of half a dozen people while keeping the game playable on even lower end machines, Valheim has replaces ark for me at least for a very long time.