Tried out ARK a bit. Weird game. Never played an MMO before, so it feels unusual that there are tons of people with me. I died to a bee and pretty much everything immediately. People just lay on the ground "sleeping". Not a good first impression. Maybe in a year or so I'll try it out again. It looks good though. Too much bloom though holy smokes.
I've got about 200 hours in ARK and still having fun, but I can feel a little bit of burnout coming. It's a great looking game, and like you've experienced, there is a lot of death early on. The "sleeping" people are just those who've logged out at random spots. They're somewhat vulnerable in that state to the environment (possible to drown someone that is logged out) or others who might want to drag them to other locations, so that's where building a shelter for yourself is key. The default Island map is fairly large with a limit of 70(?) people on at any given time so you may not see people at times except close to default spawn points.
Takes a large amount of grinding and farming materials to start appreciating the crafting and building in the game, and then comes the taming of the dinosaurs as mounts, which may take hours depending on its level and food you're using. Once you get to ride a few dinos, especially the Rex, that's when a lot of the fun begins and farming materials gets easier. I've been playing with the Alienware Twitch tribe, and we've almost done everything to do in the game so far in about a month, but new updates continue to add more content. It's worth getting through the beginning grind, so hopefully you come back when it's a little more polished.