Hi folks - thanks for your interest/feedback! I've penned up some thoughts below - apologies if it's a little long winded but I'm trying to just put it all on the table to outline the state of affairs.
It's always tough to gauge demand for these things and it is also a catch 22 in some regard - few players due to no servers <=> no servers due to few players.
As you've already gleaned, finances is definitely one of the major contributing factors - we are entirely community funded and until we are in a position where we are breaking even every month we've been having to dip into our rainy-day fund to make up the difference. We've been lucky this month due to a few one-time donations bumping us over; we also recently increased the visibility of our funding status for folks that don't visit our forums/website regularly and hope it'll have a positive effect going forward.
When our provider decided to start charging us monthly for our IP allocations last year (which were previously free) I ended up looking at player counts and making the call. As
@Aquatic Rocker observed, we had previously bumped from 1 to 2 servers in the wake of the launch of 2.0.4 in the hopes the traffic would remain stable but alas it did not pan out.
Looking at our stats pages it looks like we have about 175 or so unique active players in the AU region, and another 32 in NZ - I'd definitely be worried that with availability differences and people's personal lives this isn't enough to keep a regional server populated for a significant period of time.
I think at this time our best course of action is to keep an eye on the player trend and re-evaluate if/once the post-update enthusiasm settles down to a more regular level. I certainly appreciate your desire to contribute financially and if things look viable we can absolutely discuss it more. Dedicated hardware is expensive, of course, but in any case we would start with a VPS or two which has generally worked well enough for a trial in the past.
Oh, and in case you're wondering about the additional servers we're managing for the update, for our NA and EU offerings we are no longer in a situation where per-instance VPSes make sense and we pay a flat rate for two dedicated boxes regardless of how many game instances we have - I don't want you to feel as though we are turning this down due to finances while you see more NA/EU servers appearing to handle the increased player load.
TL;DR - we're open to the idea and further discussion but your concerns are the same ones I have. Happy to discuss further or hear if you have additional comments/feedback
