Why not? This is GREAT!... unless you are sorted in their team but STILL in persistent world they would make for great pirates and bandits!
I love to play against russians, they are so aggressive and chaotic. Sometimes easy to deal because of lack of the strategy and sometimes just "they are going to RAM us? With GOLDFISH?" and they DO! And sometimes it turns for us worse than expected.
Make harpoon a mandatory equipment for every russian capitan and I will be happy like little girl. And give them option to paint their whole ships jet-black. This would be awsome.
And this is why boarding would be awesome.
I played my first full day of GoIO today, and I loved it. My first online match dropped me into a crew of three Russian Gunners, piloting a Goldfish equipped with only flamethrowers and a hwacha. They would put the ship on full throttle ahead and all man the guns, screaming at me in Russian whenever something broke down. Needless to say, we rarely survived getting close enough to an enemy to ram them.
Sometime later I tried my hand at being a captain, piloting a Galleon with a crew of AIs when three Russians with matching clantags join my ship. Later on in the same match, I leave the helm to repair some damage, and while I'm gone one of the Russians take the helm, and they all start to shout loudly at me whenever I come close. It was like a mutiny.
As for the community as a whole, wish there was more communication overall. Most games my teammates never interact, everyone just runs around deck until we explode. Also, I wish more people played Pilots. I'm partial to the Engineer myself, but it's mildly frustrating when the captain just points us in the general direction of the enemy and puts the engines on full throttle, just so he or she can sit around in a gun for the rest of the match, eventually leading someone (often an Engineer) to take the helm.