I could go on for hours. I began playing it in Early Access in Aug of 2015. Many bugs, constant updates, and an oftentimes glitchy experience but a persistent open world environment and interactions with hundreds, thousands of people in the nearly four years since then has made it a love/hate relationship. I have somewhere around 12K hours. I have seen all of the developmental hell this game went through, from barely scraping by and the devs working 12-16 hours a day, six and seven days a week for little to no pay as an indie game that a little too closely resembled another, ill fated game that one of the leads dumped to create this one, to the eventual sellout to a massive unfeeling, unthinking corporation that immediately tried to make Dark and Light, a blatant ripoff of Ark, which was a ripoff of The Stomping Lands. I have watched it all, from the Flier Nerf that caused tens of thousands of players to quit in the span of a few days, to the joy and awe of the Center map being released on official servers as the first expansion in mid 2016. I saw the rage of gamers, angry at a ten dollar fee for downloading the Scorched Earth map, after they had paid twenty dollars in Early Access for the game, that's right, and gotten two whole maps with the addition of The Center, which was a free map.
This game hooks you, because you play at first to learn, and experience the wonders. Then, as you get better, and you build bigger, and collect more virtual pets to eat your neighbors with to protect your belongings, you become more invested. You fight, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you find yourself handcuffed to a toilet when you log in, making you someone else's personal fertilizer factory for their crops. And sometimes you login only to find everything you own gone, and nothing but red in your log. Because the game never pauses, while you sleep, people are still playing. And they might decide your stuff looks tasty. So you start over. There is no winning, no end to the game. And if you let it, it will run your life. As you can tell, mixed review for a great concept, but it is definitely a game worth putting a couple of hundred hours into for the experience. And the original 20$ I spent was well worth it.
