Anolytic

In the port battle for Nassau, a bug allowed 26 ships to enter on the attacking side, making it 26v25. To even the battle we decided on 1 player that would leave the PB as soon as the counter was done:

That's not a fort, that's a frickin' Citadel. What guns do they shoot from that? 128 pounders?

Only because of offensive screening. A clanmate of mine tagged 19 Agamemnon. That you had trouble getting into the PB doesn't mean you didn't have 25 people there.

So because we fought and won 2 ports 25v25 (Ays was after 18.00 server time btw), you are going to take 3 undefended ports as "revenge". THIS is why we can't have nice things in this game...

Just because your side has so many players that people who want to join PBs don't get the opportunity doesn't mean that our side is. We bring new players to every PB. Sometimes we even borrow away accounts to let people who can't even sail SOLs yet get into a 1st rate port battle.

Bug shown in last 5 seconds of the video.

It happened again. This time I got a ship chest, but no paint chest. It seems to be connected to capturing ships. Even though there's a whole scrolling menu of loot slots after battle, only the top row is available. And when I capture a ship with loot on it, that row is filled with fish and other stuff from the captured ship, pushing out the ship/paint notes that don't load.

You'd better provide a source for that quote. If someone from Danmark has said that in the forums, then they are mistaken or referencing misinformation. No diplomat of ours has labelled DANVE a rogue clan. We have had no rogue clans in Danmark-Norge since before the wipe.

If you actually read the wording of the truce, which I linked you, you would know that it states that "Hostility can be generated as long as the battles fall on a day after the expiration of the cease fire." The battle for Wilmington was on the 8th of January, which is after the expiration of the ceasefire. You are clearly not as well informed as you think you are. And DANVE neither is, nor were they ever, a rogue clan. DANVE also had nothing to do with the hostility for Wilmington. Wilmington was grinded by RDNN and RUS.

This is the original wording of the agreement on a Christmas Truce for orthodox Christmas: There was nothing fake about this truce, and the Danish nation kept to the truce. You really haven't been paying attention at all, have you? The OCEAN clan is not really into RvR, and they switched to Pirates - and some to the US - weeks ago. And almost every US timezones player plays for either Great Britain or the US nation, just like most of the server population in general plays for Great Britain. Why did you choose the US to play for and not any other nation?

There was no fake Christmas truce, so I don't know what you want to reopen. In any case our approach happened weeks before Christmas. The talks never got that far. Both times we approached to discuss the option further talks was refused.

I've been thinking about this suggestion too, and there are some interesting aspects to it. However the mechanic would have to be more complicated than just splitting the server into 3 time-zone regions. From the map in the OP, what would happen is that the US and the GB would divide the northern 1/3 of the map between themselves, and after that American time zones players would have nothing more to do. The Aussies in GB would capture all of the southern 1/3 regions and then have nothing more to do. And the rest of us would be fighting over the last 1/3 of the map. You might as well just cut out 2/3rds of the map and introduce a server wide PB window. That just returns us back to the Lord Protector days when Britain would zerg the smaller nations during EU primetime to capture empty ports, and then set early morning defence windows to avoid having to defend anything. The game needs more dynamic conquest, with regions frequently shifting hands and being recaptured, not less. For US and GB there would be no consequences, but for the Eastern Alliance, loosing any region would be fatal as a region lost could never be recaptured.

All diplomatic approaches to discuss the US changing sides had the explicit agenda to balance the timezones, not to flip the problem on its head. The GB has American time zone players and the Dutch (had) American time zone players, so for the US to switch alliance would be to have opposition in their primetime, and balance the server. The goal was, and would be, to reduce the problems and consequences of night-flips by having defenders and attackers available to both alliances in that time zone, and not, as you say, to night-flip the GB. GB would be able to defend with its American time-zone players. That's is all moot at this point, but there's definitely nothing hypocritical about it. It was Sweden and Danmark who spear-headed the initiative to talk to the US before Christmas.

That your trolling and your diplomacy is virtually indistinguishable makes it quite hard to deal with your nation seriously in diplomacy.

This whole "doctrine" is ridiculous. If you wanted to define a home waters area it definitely shouldn't include the rookie area and shallows in the Bahamas, which the devs specifically set up to allow nations to train their rookies. Moreover you've been night-flipping multiple times since this declaration was made, so by all accounts the doctrine was voided by you yourselves long before the Spanish even started attacking Ays or Morgan's Bluff. So there's no violation on their part. Lastly though. By presenting night-flips as a "threat", as you do here, you are undermining your own previous position of night-time battles as part of your gameplay. If night-flipping is only a tool that you use to "punish" interfering with your PvE routine, then it's not really integral to your existence in the game. Night-flipping might as well be removed by server-wide timers then. Either night-flips is a natural part of gameplay or it is not. If you use it as a tool or a threat, then it is not, and the US player base could just as easily go on without that specific element of RvR. You can't have it both ways. Now, as I've said before, I'm in favour of a global server. I believe that night-flips and 24/7 RvR is part of an open world game. Until devs find a balancing solution, night-flips are part of the game, and while it does not earn you respect or honour, it is not an exploit and should not be labelled as such. The problem with night-flips is in my opinion a game-design and game-balance issue, and not a community, nation or player issue. However as long as you keep using night-flips as a threat, and act and talk as if your goal is to sabotage the enjoyment of the game for others, more than furthering and securing your own gameplay, then you loose my respect.

My clan is actively recruiting and welcoming US/AUS timezone players (even players we know are spies to buff activity in the clan in off hours) we have a few Canadians, Americans and Australians now, but not enough to keep a healthy and consistent population in those timezones. There are not many players to recruit from in our nation, and by the time we get a new recruit another player may have left the game. Most nights we have more Europeans on than Americans. Naturally the hardcore players who play every night consistently will chose to play with a group of other consistent and hardcore players, and thus already chose another nation. During the Antilles War, I conducted every operation mainly through Nation chat, knowing well that there were spies. Inclusiveness and involving as many players as possible has always been high priority in Danmark-Norge.

The naval action community is sometimes marred by elitism, always marred by trolls, and veteran players no longer remember how it was to be a noob so they act arrogantly in many cases. So yes, you are right, there are community issues in this game. However you seem to be implying that there are some nations that have specific community issues. That small nations, like Danmark and Sverige, are small because they are somehow not welcoming to new players. This is just a cop-out that I've heard all too frequently, even from the devs. In Danmark everything from German, French, Danish/Norwegian and Spanish to Russian is spoken, but most chat is in English and the majority of clans use English as their primary language. So it's not like the problem is a language barrier. Players choose nation based primarily based on 3 factors in my experience. Some don't choose until they come to the character creation screen. Here the most noob friendly choices are probably Great Britain and Pirates. Only a masochist or someone with a prior connection to the nation would choose Danmark or Sweden there. France and Spain might be options if you're interested in history, and Dutch if you imagine your play style will be trader/crafter. Some players choose based on an emotional or geographical connection to one of the nations. Due to historical events half the world has a historical connection to the Royal Navy. The other half has read about Trafalgar and wants to role-play as Nelson. These are both things that however welcoming we are in Sweden and Danmark, we can do nothing about. By the time someone can greet them welcome to the game, they have already chosen differently. Then there are those that before making a character in the game will check out the forum and other materials about the game before joining. As GB/VP/US players already make up most of the server, this is also reflected on the forum. Even more so because other nations have more mixed communities. So anyone reading the forums before joining the game will be exposed to ten times more propaganda and recruitment messages from the GB/US/VP populations than from the other nations. In addition a lot of the National News section is about tarnishing the reputation of enemy nations with propaganda and false accusations. This also is skewed enormously by the current population balance. And lastly, if you're a player who doesn't have any prior preference between the nations when you get to the point where you should choose where to put your character, then there's the ships in-game. There are no Swedish ships. No Danish ships. When I created my character for the first time last January, it was not clear to me, because devs had not made it clear enough, whether ships were nation specific. If I wanted to sail the famous HMS Victory, which clearly I did, would I have to make my character British? In large nations there are enough players that tasks are naturally divided and there are always someone available to help new players. But there are individual clans in the British nation that alone have more active players than all of the Danish RvR-clans combined. In small nations the same players have to do everything. The same few players who show up in port battles every day, also have to welcome new players, teach them the game, train them, give them starting resources and keep them entertained. There are no tutorials in this game, no learning curve. And small nations suffer more from this than larger ones. There's not always someone online to greet new players and help them. There's not always someone available who has time, between port battles and IRL, to teach somebody manual sails or ship strengths and weaknesses. All this is to say that, no, the population balancing is not a community issue within some nations, it is a game design issue, and an issue created and maintained by developers' choices.

Actually, in his title and OP he entirely left out mentioning Danes, so I assume that the implication is he wants to exchange Danmark for the US.

The game spans a wide time period. Deciding alliances by historicity is futile. The US being on opposite sides from Britain would make sense for time-zone coverage and population dispersion. However it seems like an unlikely thing to happen. But game mechanics are needed to force more than just 2 alliance blocks, smaller alliances and also easier alliance transitions. It should be possible to switch completely from one alliance to another in 1 voting cycle if both parties agree. It would make alliances potentially more fluid and make alliance changes viable again, something which with the current mechanics they are not.