Anyone who is outside of the East Coast of the US will absolutely have a ping over 200, there is no way around that. But I would say that there is sufficient interest as a majority of your community based servers are US players on US private servers hosted in the US. As there has been more eyes on it of late due to word of mouth and content curators reaching the US audience.
Granted it is totally up to you guys to say if it's worth giving it another go and see how it works out. From my point of view it'd be a good time to try 1 server again and maybe make an announcement on Steam too so everyone can jump in on it to give a good idea of the interest, or the lack thereof. I may be a little addicted to this game and eager for a true vanilla experience on an Official Server. (Got the game on the 6th and already at 208.5 hours. I'm disabled so this helps me feel like I am working again, but enjoying it.)
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, ...
Read more