Hi Gibby, glad to be able to discuss such serious things with you since it seems to me that you were in the category of people disappointed by the game and therefore chose to stay on Warband. Not an offence, just a statement of fact and many players have done the same.
I would very much like to be able to continue this discussion on Steam or teamspeak or discord because I think that our debate does not really have a place on this thread. I will nevertheless answer here to these figures, true for some but false for others and often misunderstood or in any case, the interpretation that you make of them is not right
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For BannerLord, I propose that we look at the number of simultaneous connections on both games. 3,000 on Warband versus 15,000 on BannerLord. The revolution is here and time will prove me right: when Taleword closes the servers on Warband, you'll have to face the facts
Honestly, on this spade, I want to add that the game has really improved and the rider duels on this game are just so much better than on Warband. Honestly, this game is great:and it will continue to improve thanks to the active game community that is working with the developers to provide a better experience for players
I am going to engage with this solely to give some actual data, some of which is directly from TW, to demonstrate not only that Warband has a higher percentage of MP players per population than Bannerlord, but that it actually has a higher total of MP players than it as well.
First, you give Warband 3,000. At this very moment Warband has 6,671 players, more than double your insanely low estimate.
Second, you are accurate that Bannerlord has ~15,000, as at this moment it has 15,891.
Your insane bias and misrepresentation aside, these raw figures prove nothing in the way of total MP population for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, many Warband players use a non-steam version, so the actual number is higher than Steam shows. On Native alone, right now, there are 610 players in MP and two of the top servers, which cannot be counted in the aggregate as they are from other modules (nice browser TW), have ~100 players. I can see several others on the list with 20-50, so I'm going to be conservative and say that we add those two 100 servers to the 610, plus 4 more with 50, and we get to 1000 players in MP.
Warband has 6,671 players in total and ~1000 in MP. That's exactly 15% of the total population.
Let's start with the figures I gave. They are changing and it goes without saying that the figures do not remain the same from one day to the next. Nevertheless, for a game that is in Early Access and has only one module against a game that has been installed for a long time with many mods and modules, excuse me for telling you but the domination of BannerLord is unquestionable and the fact that there are at least 2 times more players and at most 11 times more is huge. Moreover, you will notice that BannerLord has a stable base while for Warband, it varies according to the competitions and with always the same players. So to say that Warband is more popular than BannerLord is wrong.
For Bannerlord things are a little more complicated because we do not have numbers for the matchmaking, only the barren server browser which gives us a total of 176 players. As said, we can only speculate on the numbers in matchmaking, but I think if we are being generous we can theorise there are at least the same number in matchmaking as in the server browser, so if we multiply our 176 by two, we get 352 players.
these figures are wrong. Let's take an example and count the number of teams present at the BEAST tournament on BannerLord. There are 36 separate teams in 4 divisions, each with between 10 (minimum) and 18 players. This makes a total of at least 360 and at most 648 players. The average is in the 504 players active in skirmish competitions and this does not include the North Americans or players who do not compete but rather do events on the seats or in captain's mode.
However, don't think that I am only using speculation, as we do have cold hard numbers which Callum (TW Community Manager) gave to me upon release of Early Access, which was 6,000 in MP out of a 250,000 total. This is a MASSIVE 2.4% of the total population, six times lower than what Warband has.
The percentage here is meaningless since it is known that it is the singleplayer of BannerLord who advertised as for Warband before. Except that nowadays, nobody plays the Warband solo anymore but instead they play the BannerLord solo. The percentage of multiplayer players compared to the total number of players will therefore logically be higher on Warband than on BannerLord, which has many more people. Nine3, (TW Dev) can confirm aswell
Now, obviously the 250,000 Bannerlord had on release did not last, as we can see it has been reduced to 6% of the number with a mere 15,000, so we cannot use the 6,000 MP figure either. However, what we can use is the 2.4% figure which we got from using the figures provided by TaleWorlds. If we apply this to the 15,000 total players in Bannerlord we get 360 players, little more than 1/3 of the total players in Warband's MP.
So, for Bannerlord's MP, using my speculation we reach 352 players and using the data from TaleWorlds we get 360 players. With this in mind, I think it's fair to say that Bannerlord sits comfortably between 350 and 400 players in its MP.
So, here are the actual accurate final numbers for you DragonKing.
If there were only 300 players, I think we could talk about a real disaster, but as I said before, it's not the case. The number of players on BannerLord is very high. on the skirmish mod alone and in a European-only competition with only one game mode, we reach a approximatly more than 500 active players. i doubt that even on the Napoleonic Wars community (I can't talk about the native) reaches such a number.
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Warband total: 6,671
Warband MP: ~1000
Warband MP as a percentage of whole: 15%
Bannerlord total: 15,891
Bannerlord MP: 350-400
Bannerlord MP as a percentage of whole: 2.35%
Categorically, you are wrong to claim that Bannerlord has a more popular MP than Warband.
so once again, I take the liberty of correcting your error by saying that there are more players on BannerLord than you assume. obviously the vast majority play solo. Everybody started that way on Warband and more and more players are going to occupy the multiplayer. This number will increase while yours will certainly decrease unfortunatly for Warband
I don't bother to check for the 1000 multiplayer players but once again it's on all the modules and I really doubt that you'll be able to bring them together on a single mod
I purposely kept that part of DK's bullshitery away in the former drama but I will add to what Gibby said that you can check the team rosters of the BEAST tournaments (which are now at their third edition) and you will see a pattern where almost none of the most active and arguably best players of the different competitive multiplayer modules throughout the last 6-7 years (NW, Native & even Mercenaries) can be spotted. Some went back to inactivity, some stayed on WB but only a slim percentage (below 1% I'd argue) actually kept hopes when it comes to BL multiplayer (in a competitive aspect).
That doesn't mean that BL doesn't have a competitive scene, but clearly, by delivering a clumsy and completely unfinished product, failing to listen to the people who actually knew what they were talking about (Gibby here can tell you a lot about it) and generally failing at understanding why their game had such a lasting highly competitive community throughout all these years, TW killed any potential for a strong, active and highly competitive multiplayer scene on BL.
That's not the point of the thread but let it be a lesson for people who actually don't mind straight-up lying to you to fuel their false narrative. You want to go play BL, tryhard and try to make the multiplayer scene at least as good as what warband was, go for it, nobody ain't stopping you. But trying to threaten players who still very much care about warband in telling them that they will be forced to play BL once TW close the servers is a disgusting approach that is bound to fail. If TW actually does that at some point, that won't make these players switch to BL.
Rant over, sorry about the off-topic.
Tardet, I don't agree with you and yet I'm not saying you're a piece of shit or that you say shit. I thought you were more courteous, but obviously not with everyone. The fact that you say that there is no dialogue between players and developers is once again untrue. Indeed, BannerLord favours singleplayer. Nevertheless, as I said on my previous posts, a dialogue has been made between developers and players from mutli. We sometimes play and test the game and the different patches together in order to give a feedback and that's the goal of an early access
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no need to criticize a newborn being born because he doesn't speak but if you help him to develop then he can become a Molière. It's an Ealry Acces forget the 8 years we had to wait and tell you that in a few months the game will be over. Do you want to help the game or just criticize it because it is not exactly as the Warband players expected it to be, i.e. a copy of Warband with best graphics
I think Tardet that you know the Warband community very well and certainly better than I do. But that doesn't mean that you know the BannerLord community. Your first impressions were right for a while but are not anymore. I strongly advise you to inform yourself instead of spitting on a game you'll have to go to since it's the sequel to Warband... Or maybe you'd rather die on Warband, it's up to you to see you're old enough for that