Eco Dev Tracker

I tell you a secret: 9.7 uses the 10.0 codebase.

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 a...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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)

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 peop...

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, ...

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

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.