[2022] Will there be a NA Official Server?

There could be if there would be sufficient interest, which is not there at the moment. We had an official NA server, but that was barely used with people instead playing on popular community servers for the region. Hosting there is also five times as pricey as in the EU and most US players have fine ping to our EU servers (the lag issues are very unlikely to be caused by your ping), so we decided to discontinue them. We also noted that despite NA server available, a good bunch of US players still chose to play on the EU server - which is something we encourage as well, as people from a bit different cultural backgrounds together is great for playing Eco.

I've not seen any US players having a ping surpassing 200, and that is absolutely fine to play Eco without noticeable issues. Peeps I play or have to do with also do not report any issues due to ping of that value. There is several of server side lag issues though that will be prevalent, but are not ping related. (See the Steam announcement on what we are working on)

Where ping kicks in was mostly the australian players at 600.

And as for the edited in money comment: We do plan a whole culture feature for Eco and bringing people from different countries together on the same server is super interesting. US and EU players on the same server typically give a good fight about taxes and governance.

Well, that does fit with our state of knowledge and my experience. (There should be two Aussie communities, though?)

I can of course only tell of data we have and my personal experience - west coast players on White Tiger did not tend to exceed the 200 ping notably, neither on the other official servers. Exceptions will very likely exist.

You also state that the US players mostly play on community servers - that's what they did when an official server was available as well, which was a major part of the reason the official was not being used. I still see lots of them on our official servers as well, though, just as before on the EU officials even when the US one did exist.

It is unfortunately very unlikely there will be another official US server anytime soon though - we do not get many requests for that (yours being the third I noted for this year, I got more requests from australian players) and the US population seems to be pretty happy with their community servers, especially considering the use you described, because US players do make the biggest single sales group of Eco, but EU totals out higher in both sales and player numbers, even if that might be to your surprise - it's been like that forever.

Central EU is hence the place of the majority of players and a pretty good place for servers the vast majority of all players can play without having notable issues, while a US server does not provide for the same effect - but has five times the cost, which does unfortunately play a role at a budget limited small studio, especially as US hosters do not seem to have the hardware we use for EU servers as a thing you can widely get as a normal customer for prices that are usual for a wide customer base, but mostly as special things or needs to be co-located. (We use Ryzen 5950X CPU servers)

If there is enough interest, people can let us know on respective channels though, we track that feedback. It's enough to note in any conversation basically on any of our channels. If there will be enough interest it'll be automatically considered, just as any other thing for Eco as well. It might not always be super obvious, but we have a strong habit of collecting feedback on all our channels and it's regularly brought up internally as well.

I'm not totally sure if an official server would actually provide the experience you are specifically seeking, as they are quite different and most have rules that prevent any behaviour that is generally considered disruptive or unfair in the community - which is not the case on all community servers. That is given I don't know what exactly you mean with 'vanilla' experience though, given our official servers aren't "vanilla" either, aside of mods - with the exception of White Tiger which has mods. Darwin's Fox starts out with a basic government and currency. Official servers have different rules, tend to attract different people and have different runtimes, which makes zoning them on regions hard - as each of the official server has a specific setup fitting a specific purpose, so we'd need to copy all servers to the US or decicde for a single of their concepts for the US server. This might actually also have played a role in the low usage back then, as the population needs to be big enough to not split itself up but also to have interest in a specific concept. An actual 'vanilla' experience for Eco does not really exist either.

In opposite we actively encourage people to play on community servers that do the craziest stuff, because Eco comes to life by the very fact it is more of a sandbox framework admins can do exceptional stuff with - and we consider every single one of them vanilla, as in that's how Eco shall be experienced. In all these ways.

// Edited for clarity at some points, it's too late here, lol.

That calculation seems off, it seems to assume we could use some Game Server Provider that offers 'slots' - we do generally advise against using such GSP's, but rather use some that give you guaranteed hardware. The best offer that PingPerfect for example has (which caps out at 8 GB memory) will be able to host - free of issues - about 30 people online at the same time on a medium sized world, if people don't use a lot of civics - it costs around 100 € already. Unfortunately it doesn't allow us full server access, which we need, as we do use custom builds and settings for official servers.

Our official servers are hosted on dedicated bare metal servers with Ryzen 5950X Processors, PCIe 4 NVME SSDs and lots of memory. White Tiger uses around up to 32 GB of memory typically, when it's 100 people, mid-game and lots of civics it can easily be another bit more. That's numbers a GSP - especially offering slots - does not give you, they share much weaker servers with multiple people, not guaranteeing you any resources directly and are not suitable for the purposes of an official server. We are having issues reported with GSP hosting at support all the time, I'm also not aware of any major community server not using dedicated hardware.

People that played on White Tiger will additionally be able to confirm that even that hardware is not enough. There is also currently the server of a french streamer ongoing that tried to do 300 players, with no success on their a tad bit weaker baremetal server, now having a limit on 80 players but still with notable lag issues - that's not having a lot of civics though.

For hosting Eco servers it is key that you have a processor that has as much single-threaded power as any possible (at that time, the 5950X provided that, which is also why we use consumer hardware and not server hardware typically optimized for multi-core), a fast SSD for as fast as possible database I/O for civics and a good bunch of memory. It unfortunately doesn't scale linear - there is a lot we have to optimize and even after that Eco will still be taxing for servers.

See my answer to Kyxoan7 above, whenever people just state dollar amounts and some "upgrades" instead of rough hardware pieces I'm not sure what they are actually buying and assumption goes to being at a GSP, so saying anything concrete would just be speculation.

Feel free to keep me updated on user numbers, though. Unfortunately this reddit post didn't get a lot of upvotes either, which could have been a measure of interest as well. (Plus make sure that you don't mimic the official server names and description too closely, that is violating our ToS and has gotten servers removed in the past that tried to deceive people)

We don't kick people for asking for boats, when that update comes or if the game is dead. (All of this happens daily, boats probably 5 times) If you want me to look up the actual reason, feel free to start a private chat. Rules on Discord are pretty identical to the ones here on Reddit.

That would have been a wrong decision nontheless, in that case a temporary mute is due first. A kick is generally only used for people that were active on the Discord before but are now spamming (potential hacked users that can come back without needing to write to support when they sorted it out). A ban requires at least a mute and a clear warning having been done before. So offer still stands, mistakes in moderation happen.

I'd recommend to remove the line about Strange Loop Games completely. People overread single words really easy. Basically you should not claim any affiliation or relation to our name at all without explicit approval.

I'm really sorry you got that impression, it was not intended. I just tried to honestly explain in as much detail as I am allowed why US official servers are not currently a thing and won't be other than if there is a sufficient need displayed that makes it a economically senseful thing for the company, which I am not deciding. This is nothing against americans either (just as it is nothing against Oceania or Asia for which we also do not intend any official servers at this point, aside of a potential limited china version), our CEO is one and the company, even though full remote and all over the world is registered there.

Please also give me the doubt of not being a native english speaker. I in no way intended snide remarks or any belittling, but I do not grasp the effect my words have to the extent a native speaker has. I am sorry for what I appeared as. I assume you might have gotten that impression due to me stating that the US is not actually the majority of players as it had seemed to me was a major argument of you. I found it useful to clear that up to show why it makes good sense for us to host our servers in a world-central location that allows most people acceptable access, for an effective cost, fulfilling the idea of players from different regions playing together on one server and fitting into our system of having different official servers with different goals hosted and not splitting up the community too much - at the same time incentivizing playing on community servers, as we want you to :)

As far as my comment towards ToS goes - I am coming from a legal background. Our goal with it is that a server does not appear in any way to be an official server. That means that any person that does not pay any deeper attention may not get the impression of it being related to us. I do get the legal instinct of making a disclaimer, but for the goals our ToS have that is actually harmful as by matter of life fact people do not read intensively at all. Something similar to how we do it will for many not be recognized as what you wanted them to recognize, as they simply do not read your text but just look at the similar appearance or overread the "not". We want to avoid that, as the goal is to make absolutely sure that noone could get the impression of an affiliation and that means taking into account how people typically approach stuff. And people typically do not read any disclaimers - and if they do, they do so quickly without paying attention on detail or do not necessarily understand them.

Just in case you are interested: That is also the reason why in my country a law prohibits clauses in contracts targeted to a mass market (as in accepted unchanged by many people, like ToS) to contain no 'surprising elements', e.g. only stuff that people count on being in there anyway - because they do not read them. It's part of consumer protection laws over here. I do not know if similar exists in your legal system.

In any case SLG by design and work force is a multi-cultural company, promoting people from as many different cultures coming together on a single server. We certainly have no intention to exclude anyone.

G-Portal is a great provider, just as Ping Perfect. I've worked with them in the past and all GSPs will provide sufficient power for your game with friends and small servers.

But once you go into the area of community forming with a server I would strongly recommend to get a dedicated server (that excludes virtual servers as well) for that - you will have better performance for the lower price and a lot more options. We do craft custom builds for servers to fix issues or improve performance for example that these communities can then use, until we can test it there and release in a hotfix. Such stuff is typically not possible on a GSP. (Though Ping Perfect might make that possible for you on request, they're really great guys)

I also cannot recommend using clouds, we have tried that for our own hosting system and it didn't work well as the CPU power of most cloud providers is insufficient, due to be made for multi-core, not high single-thread. Amazon did two years ago get some better cloud offer for that purpose, but we haven't tried that - so that might work a bit better.