The servers are ok. We get reports of this kind of trouble from Russia quite frequently. The devs have investigated it thoroughly, and there is nothing wrong on Plarium's side.

It seems that the only "fix" is to try to find a network that works. Maybe VPN, if you have access to it. So far, no one who tried it reported back, so I don't know if that actually works, but it should.

You're right..

What's a little confusing about this issue is that it logs into the account without any problems. 

Thank you for your attention to the matter! 

A game like this pulls resources from multiple services. I don't know all the bits specifically about Pirates, but each map itself (havens, users,...) used to be split in at least 2 Plarium's servers (hence different "archipelagos" in global chats; they are really different servers that "talk" to each other about battles, but they don't sync "global" chats), while the images and sounds most likely come from some external storage like Amazon's S3. The authentication of users (which is not the same as players on particular games' specific maps) has its own server (I'd assume it's also Plarium's and not external, except on FB). And it's all behind Cloudflare which is yet another service unrelated to the rest that I've listed. I have no idea how/where the databases themselves are hosted. Could be Plarium's servers, but it's most likely some third party provider.

My point here is that, "simple games" (or most web based apps these days) are quite complex under the hood and can involve multiple very different networks and services by different companies.

A long time ago, I had a problem with my own app that was hosted on two servers of the same company, with some switcher ("load balancer") serving stuff from one or the other. The servers were on different subnets, but - again - in the same company, yet one was dragging to the point of being unusable, while the other was flying. The reason? Their subnets had vastly different speeds toward a third party resource that the app was using (resolved by getting the hosting company to move the slow one to the other subnet). Took me a while to understand where the bottlenet is and even longer to get the company to make the switch.

It's just a mess that's often hard to untangle, even when you control all the pieces.

Sorry for the long technical rant. I know it doesn't help, but I hope it makes it easier to understand how is it possible that Plarium simply cannot resolve this kind of problem.