Well I chose to give it a go again, have put about 20-25 hours in this week. I spent the first few just checking out different servers. Due to not playing for over a year + I thought once I downloaded my data in a server I had to run back to an obelisk to move again. You don't - you can do it at supply drops, and as I found out, I think relating to the above post, when I finally got to an obelisk it was completed sealed off with metal and auto-turrets
I logged off at that point but the next day found that once you have uploaded you seem to be able to download anywhere repeatedly but I assume now that I am a level higher I would have to re-upload to switch again or lose that level. After a bit of research it seems that the big hate for the server switching is due to alpha tribes losing their alphaness to random russian/chinese and other tribes who destroy absolutely everything which is fair enough.....although from other reports I have read a lot of alpha tribes who had actually been decent to others on their server banded together with the smaller tribes and have successfully defended. I think it is just the server choice and the mentality of people playing on it that will decide.
I ended up settling on an EU Centre server as hadn't played the map and there is a surprising amount of Russians on there as a lot of the text at different times of the days are just the square blocks replacing the characters I don't have
I've been randomly killed a few times by other players including one knockout, handcuffs, and encumbered which is just unecessary but it was 3 dudes wearing hide armour and I had my nice new shiny flack set on but running around a beach taming a ptera! Solo PvP is hard but I am just being more careful
Shamefully its still incredibly addictive but they really do seem to have just added content, most of the bugs including my biggest one the buggy Dino AI is still there, but with a Spring 2017 release and them still claiming 'its an Alpha' then we will have to see if it actually goes Beta before release which should be the refining.