We've changed and adapted the rules and settings over the last three years to provide long lasting fun and the lowest latency possible.
Structures, creatures and items add up on PvE servers quite fast because not a lot will be lost due to missing PvP and raids. The many items stored in several storages also increase server load each time a client requests the inventory from the server. Thousand of structures in hundreds of chunks that have to be rendered, active players that are traveling through those chunks and request data from the server all of the time, additionally wild and tamed dinos that are within all players' reach and have to be computed, drops and farming... even a modern and overclocked root server reaches its limits with that. Also because Ark unfortunately doesn't utilize multithreading very well.
Those are some reasons why we have a base limit and a size limit for the additional outpost for example.
We have over 450 registered tribes and a tame limit of 400 or just 100 per tribe is not possible without sacrificing performance. Sure, some people move on and a few slots will be freed but in the meanwhile everyone can't have any new dinos as long as the (global) tame limit is reached. New players will be pinned for quite some time, get frustrated and move on. We don't want that, of course.
Therefore we've introduced the Dino Storage modthat allows every tribe to have as many dinos as they like, while the world tame limit is respected and the server performance is not affected that much. That's why there is a tribe limit of 50 active dinos which may look weird or not enough at first but dino storage is easy to handle and it allows you to have all the dinos you want - just ask the breeders on our servers.
Other settings that may be different from all the other casual servers are based on personal experience, mod related circumstances, balancing, discussions (with players) in our forum or requests that we considered plausible and beneficial for the community.