Mansen

The solution seems quite obvious to me - Leave missions locked off initially, but change the overworld sword icon to something if an enemy invades the battle, and let anyone join in to defend the defender. That way people will be able to get help in missions if attacked by "outside" forces - And would be helpers don't have to click every single icon in range to find the right one. The difference in icons gives it a sort of urgency and focus.

Yeah... except for the part about not being possible to ban anyone for having multiple accounts.

Come now - WoW hasn't had any meaningful PVP cross-faction warfare (least of all any that warranted "spying") since before Battlegrounds were introduced (yes - that long ago).

Because game balance.

No bonuses indeed, but giving players an indication of the nation size wouldn't hurt.

You should definitely state what server you're getting this from...

First of all there are plenty of NPC spawned ships for sale in ports all over the region - And no, prices are not even remotely insane. If anything the NPC ships are underpriced, as in cheaper than the base crafting materials needed to make it in the first place. You want GPS? Really... does no one remember how to use a road map?

No - But trade companies did have logos and other such branding to indicate who owned them. And who to steer clear of...

Neutrals could have an assortment of NPC ships protecting it?

Is the ship stat chart up to date? Got some people in chat claiming it is out of date. Just trying to get the accurate stats.

Additionally you could put a constant countdown timer at the top of the screen in the last 10 minutes or so. Just to really drive the point through that folks need to get to safety.

With the influx of new players (most of which will never read a pinned thread) I think it would be a good idea to add some earlier warnings of downtime. After all a battle can last upwards of 1½ hours - especially the small and large battles that people can just try to wait out by kiting the winning side. I suggest adding warnings going all the way up to 2 hours before scheduled downtime just to ensure people won't be violently thrown out of battles.

I'll agree to that... once the shallows are turned down a notch. Ships like the cutter can get a LOT closer to land in most places where shallows prevent you - safely.

Yeah... nice try. The nuclear approach is clearly not the way to go - You'd also nuke your possessions on all other servers, which is obviously not particular "lore friendly" or mechanically optimal.

While I have no issue with the Russian audience, I agree that their presence can be pretty... overwhelming in chat. Instead of having to ignore everyone you don't want to hear (some of which might actually speak perfectly fluent English and choose to do so), I suggest an option in the interface to hide all chat messages with Cyrillic character in them. It doesn't really discriminate, since it's a "per player" choice - And you'd most likely do it, since you can't read Cyrillic characters, much less understand Russian words. On an entirely different subject - Y'all really need to change the chat font. Accented letters and Cyrillics appear in bold. It looks silly. So silly.