When it comes to certain video games, you can love them so much and yet hate certain aspects at the same time. One of those games for me is Ark: Survival Evolved. I can play that game for hours and hours, building houses and taming animals and dinosaurs. BUT! There is a massive twist. If I play PVE or PVP on the dedicated servers to Ark, it takes forever to do anything. I’m spawning into a world full of other players and the settings are the bare minimum. You must hack away at rocks and trees for hours just to get the materials that you need to make one wall. So what I did for a little while was just play on my own non-dedicated server. You can change the settings so that you level up faster, or gather more materials. It is more fun and you get to experience the game in a better fashion. Once again I put a BUT into this section as well. If you wish to play with friends and they join your non-dedicated server, you are tethered by an invisible leash! You are allowed to go 300 meters away from the host, but when you get too far or the host moves, you warp back to them so that you are all together. So if you hop on a flying Dino and try to get away, you can’t! After a little bit of research and me wanting to let my friends join and have free roam to the whole map and do their own thing, I found that you can rent servers and play all day long on Ark! There is a company named Nitrado, in which you can download an app on your Xbox (yes I play it on Xbox). This app lets you customize the world just as I did with the non-dedicated server. Fit to what I want to play and how, my friends can join even if I set a password and being the host I can log onto the website and log the server on or off at anytime I want. Also Nitrado does rent server space for many games accross many platforms. Renting a server from Nitrado it does cost you some money and you can open up more slots for a higher cost. In my honest opinion, if you have the money and will play this game a lot go for the rentable servers. A fully customized game at your finger tips. Fun with friends and challenges at the same time is always fun. I’ve been playing Ark for about a year and a half now and still enjoy playing it when I can get on. Let me know what your go to game is. Keep on gaming!