You literally sit there for six hours. Yes, it's stupid which is why every unofficial server changes it.
You knock out a dinosaur. Then you put food in its inventory and, every now and then (time dependent on the type of dino), it eats some food and its tame meter goes up. How much it goes up depends on the food: raw meat, cooked meat, prime meat and some fancy kibbles you can make (herbivores have a selection of berries and kibble). Also, it gradually regains consciousness so you need to pump narcotics into it to keep it sedated. The need to keep it sedated and the risk of a wandering dino making a meal of your drugged up triceratops is what keeps you more or less pinned to the area.
The thought of the developers (much like McQuaid's "Vision" for Everquest) is that lengthy tames would make you deeply invested in your dinosaur and force people to use tribes. In reality, most people are like "Eff that noise" because stuffing berries and drugs into a mammoth for four hours isn't remotely entertaining.
4x speed feels like a good middle ground. You do want some investment in there otherwise you might as well just have the admin force tame everything by fiat. And tames are still long enough to keep risk of wandering predators, collecting enough food and preventing you from casually rolling with fifty brontos just 'cause you could.
Edit: It's worth noting that the game is still in "early access" alpha and the developers are looking into mixing up taming methods beyond "drug and feed". But that's the main method at the moment and I assume it'll remain the standard even as they add new tweaks. And that the alternate methods will remain time intensive since, again, the "vision".
Edited, Nov 18th 2015 8:53am by Jophiel
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Belkira wrote:
Wow. Regular ol' Joph fan club in here.