That depends entirely on what you consider ideal progression. For the best experience of actually overcoming the extra difficulties this mod adds, I would leave XP rates as 1x or 2x maybe. BUt it if you don't consider waiting to level up to be able to use certain things ideal, then you will want higher.

My current preferred race for what I feel has a nice balance is 3x harvest, 3x XP and 5x taming..

I use 3x XP 5x gather 20x taming, because for some reason alpha taming is a bit buggy even with their favorite kibble. The 20x does trivialize pre alpha tier a bit, but honestly that's like 5% of EC. Getting 1% tame at 10x efficiency with golden/favorite kibble is not cool. :[

The best way to play Extinction is on vanilla rates and settings.
But having fun with this, depends on what your'e looking for. Extinction is a very well balanced (the best balanced if you ask me) mod that has a long playtime and very high difficulty if you not change some settings. So if you have a lot of ark experience, i mean you played hundreds or thousands of hours and now searching a new, long lasting challange together with some friends or maybe solo (very hard) - this is your mod. Extinction has so much frustrating moments, but it's nearly like playing dark souls. After lots of attemts and rage quit moments you make a step forward and it feels so good :-)
On vanilla setting, it easy can take months or longer to do everything possible in this mod. If this is not what you want, i suggest taming x5, harvest x3 and xp x2, player weigth, health, fortitude x2. Dino stats like damage and health are crtitical for good balancing. Do not ramp them up too much, or you will destroy a lot of the mod's potential only for having an easy start. A solution would be using "singleplayer settings" on your server, but i'm not quiet sure how this settings affect on taming speed or xp and other things.
Hope it helped a little.

Originally posted by LoneWolf (Hudson):

The best way to play Extinction is on vanilla rates and settings.
But having fun with this, depends on what your'e looking for. Extinction is a very well balanced (the best balanced if you ask me) mod that has a long playtime and very high difficulty if you not change some settings. So if you have a lot of ark experience, i mean you played hundreds or thousands of hours and now searching a new, long lasting challange together with some friends or maybe solo (very hard) - this is your mod. Extinction has so much frustrating moments, but it's nearly like playing dark souls. After lots of attemts and rage quit moments you make a step forward and it feels so good :-)
On vanilla setting, it easy can take months or longer to do everything possible in this mod. If this is not what you want, i suggest taming x5, harvest x3 and xp x2, player weigth, health, fortitude x2. Dino stats like damage and health are crtitical for good balancing. Do not ramp them up too much, or you will destroy a lot of the mod's potential only for having an easy start. A solution would be using "singleplayer settings" on your server, but i'm not quiet sure how this settings affect on taming speed or xp and other things.
Hope it helped a little.

Thanks a lot, I was just looking for a rough idea of how I should go about it. I appreciate the comment it helps quite a lot. I'm standing at 390 hours right now and I've basically seen all the DLC content and am waiting for Extinction, so I think Extinction Core will be a good change, thanks.