I can tell you... fixing the rank system.

And to be honest, I really don't give a flying f*** about renaming countries... the thing in central Europe is called Germany and I really don't care if it is called Germany, Greater Germany, the German Republic, the German Empire, the People's Republic of Germany, the Reich, the Core of the EU, or the Banana Republic of user18273466... get us rivers and a supply system instead!

Rivers? Pah! We need trenches!

I could care less about rivers and the supply system… invading and going on the offensive is hard and punishing enough anyway! Sure, it may be nice for us Veterans, but I’m sure that new players wouldn’t want MORE difficultly when playing the game… it’s just too complicated as is… having a bit more customization is what I and I’m sure many other players would like. I mean, taking over the world and building an empire (as a country in this time period) is honestly what I joined for.. not being able to form the Greater Germanic Reich! Or the Global Communist Order or United States of Earth or whatever the hell is just a little loss. Trolls? How are leader names and flags not already a problem, wouldn’t makes if anything make it easier to find and kill them? To be fully straight? This is probably one of the things I want added most…

Renaming countries would be abused in an extremely bad manner.

And changing your flag, or leader name isn’t? That argument is always blown out of proportion, and it’s not right to let a few trolls take away the fun for others. Just kill those people, they suck at the game anyway.

You do have a point.

Kill those people in game

As car's legal representative Id like to state that this was a joke-

Btw I won't have time to answer every question, that's why I usually don't like being tagged, as it kinda forces me to answer specific things instead of giving me the freedom to choose where I answer in the forums. So please don't expect me to answer absolutely everything here :).

Anyway, to answer this one:

There are certainly upsides and downsides to enable users to rename countries:

pro:
- allows users to fulfill their fantasy of building empire XYZ. Also good for roleplaying purposes.
- funny memes

con:
- meme names might make people who wanna enjoy historical authenticity uncomfortable.
- ToS violotations. Moderation workload / player reports would go up. If you wanna prevent that by allowing players to only form names from pre-set words, then the feature complexity would go up.
- It would be harder to find certain countries. Right now when someone who changed their flag and ingame name writes you, you can still identify them on the map by their country name. If players can change everything, it makes it much harder to keep track, especially if players change this multiple times in a row. If you wanna prevent that with a limit, then storing the info for each player how often they used the feature in each match makes the whole feature more complex.
- Country name is rendered on the map. Map font does not support all exotic characters that players could put in. Also not sure if the name on the map can be altered on the fly, as it is not a UI element it makes it slightly more complex. Could also exceed available space on map or in UI, so probably would need some character limit.

Don't know how long it would take, depends in which format it would be implemented in the end. Just allowing players to rename with 0 restrictions or limitations, then it would probably be not that much. But of course it would increase workload for support over time. Oh and always plan in the QA process and release cycles, even small changes have to go through sometimes bureaucratic processes to ensure nothing gamebreaking happens.
I can tell you that currently it is not really a prio of the dev team to do any changes in this regard.

Regarding the flags, as far as I know they are stored in a certain resolution at maximum to not overload the servers with lots of big images. I dont know the max resolution right now but with testing you can probably find out.

imo, don't allow name change or flag change...

I want Spiderman's suit to be purple and orange...

Just....Don't

Next thing you know they will want to have pink unit icons on the map.

Flag changes are already in the game

I know....remove them

That’s the stupidest suggestion I’ve ever heard. When has it effected a game negatively? You can’t even see the flag 60% of the time!

Give an inch and they'll want a mile

We've seen this many times in these "suggestions"

Didn’t you want all monetization removed from the game regardless of games need to survive? Isn’t that quite the mile?

Heh, I'm perfectly OK with removing gold from the game and then make them pay for changing their name, their flag, or those pretty pink tanks to drive around in!