Quick friday note: ARK has released a new official mod called Primitive+, which limits the game to stone and below tiers, and also introduces new lower level tiers of building. It looks pretty interesting overall, and ARK has changed so much since I last played that its almost a new game. Might be time to spin it up again, especially once my 1080GTX is finally here.
PS: Ghost/Karrigan if you read this, ping me on Steam.
Hardcore Casual 
This is really interesting. Primitive always seemed to me to be the vastly better game mode, without all the psuedo-arena BS you got with 2015 native Ark, just minecraft meets far cry meets jurassic park on a great engine.
I think the better question is whether they’ve done anything with tame times or limited the power of dinos in some way since I last played. Whilst new servers will mean a fresh start, if it’s still the same deal as last year then do you really want to be grinding to make kibbles all day every day?
I believe on the official servers the taming times remain the same, but on plenty of unofficial servers taming time and other stuff is much faster, which is what I’m leaning towards now. Taming a dino for 5hr is epic, but I’ve done it, and don’t really want to do it again.
This is one I’m going to let hit full release before getting back into. I had fun, but the lack of optimization/stuttering/etc on the graphics front really hurt the experience for me.