The NW Community & Mods: The Elephant In The Room

[SeanBeansShako]

So yeah, after the cancellation of the Official Blood And Iron event one of the few left in the whole community has got me thinking really.

Why is it the community can't stick with mods? I've been watching the development and release of several mods over the last year (North and South, BC and Blood And Iron) and I notice a huge flurry of excitement and eagerness to play these things with the constant attention and posts in their development threads.

Then around a month from release suddenly all attention and focus from these newly released or updated version of these mods virtually vanishes overnight. From a decent event schedule of several hundred players the population drops to the point where more people are playing the original Half Life death match. This kind of really sucks guys. Especially since seem to have loads of NW events doing the same motions now which quite frankly must be getting boring to some people and regiments in general.

So lets talk about this. Why does this happen? Is Warband too old? the DLC too expensive to keep up a good population of people to actually attend more than a handful of events? does this community actually really only like playing NW and anything straying from that path seem a novelty at best to them?  does the community simply not have enough money or time to have servers and events for mods AND base NW? Is the word about these mods not getting out enough? Is Bannerlord that much of a thing yet to virtually halt modding or interest in mods?

We really should try and discuss this. Why? Simply because all the time and energy the people behind these projects skinning, coding, scening and mapping shouldn't be wasted and ignored in less than a 2 month gap.

[William]

There is no where to appeal to public players who would download "en masse". If there was a way to release announcements of something to help players or something download the mod, would be great, would slow the death of a mod.

[SeanBeansShako]

I'm quite surprised very few people know that there is a Warband Nexus. That would solve a lot of issues with hosting and give people a download link that is Mediashite.

[Willhelm]

There definitely needs to be some way to get mods known to more people, probably about 25% of the NW players visit the forum, and about 50% of them play mods, and not many stick by mods. If it could be announced to a larger audience they would last a lot longer. It's very demotivating to spend months working on something for people to quit playing it after 2-3 months.

[Joseph Graham]

I would imagine a lot of the issues stem from the Warband engine itself and a lack of a community portal in-game. Only so many use the forums, and even less the Steam page.

[SeanBeansShako]

Communication seems to be a generally big issue I can agree. It is weird as each NW mod shoots up the Mod DB lists when it comes out but aside from Iron Europe we generally don't see the addition of new people at least to the official forums and all.

[Matthew]

I spent a year using mbrepository before I found Mount and Blade nexus.

P.S. Wedding Dance is best mod ever.

[Gokiller]

The community is to small to substain a proper population in a modification for NW. With warband the influx of new people is just way bigger because the people only have to buy warband. New people for NW mods are just harder to get because people would have to buy the DLC as well (considering its getting quite some critics on the taleworlds forum, it doesn't looks to well). Apart from that the people that are in the warband community, enjoy the somewhat kinda timeframe more that warband offers then NW offers or its mods. Not to forget that most warband modifications have singleplayer as well. Which I'm sure of keeps a small-scale community base active.

NW mods run around hypes. Depending on the state of the modification and the active ness of the modders. For example, the Anglo-Zulu mod team stopped working on it, same goes with the Roman mod, same goes for North&South. Each of these mods are somewhat death, or played by a really small base of people who just enjoy the setting a lot. (Which you will always see) If mods are supposed to be successful one could argue that a sudden stop of development by the developers makes some people stop playing it. As they think the mod is death. (which is the result most of the time)

Iron Europe has some hope in there, but the setting and the horrible laggs, and crashing servers just ruins the fun. Unless that gets fixed and updated I can't say it will sustain a long-time population regardless of the awesome idea of trench warfare, machine guns, grenades.

[Von Alten]

The community is to small to substain a proper population in a modification for NW. With warband the influx of new people is just way bigger because the people only have to buy warband. New people for NW mods are just harder to get because people would have to buy the DLC as well (considering its getting quite some critics on the taleworlds forum, it doesn't looks to well). Apart from that the people that are in the warband community, enjoy the somewhat kinda timeframe more that warband offers then NW offers or its mods. Not to forget that most warband modifications have singleplayer as well. Which I'm sure of keeps a small-scale community base active.

NW mods run around hypes. Depending on the state of the modification and the active ness of the modders. For example, the Anglo-Zulu mod team stopped working on it, same goes with the Roman mod, same goes for North&South. Each of these mods are somewhat death, or played by a really small base of people who just enjoy the setting a lot. (Which you will always see) If mods are supposed to be successful one could argue that a sudden stop of development by the developers makes some people stop playing it. As they think the mod is death. (which is the result most of the time)

Iron Europe has some hope in there, but the setting and the horrible laggs, and crashing servers just ruins the fun. Unless that gets fixed and updated I can't say it will sustain a long-time population regardless of the awesome idea of trench warfare, machine guns, grenades.

yeah, pretty much

[Kator Viridian]

Here is your ratio for sustainability of people for a mod in NW:

Warband population > Napoleonic wars population > Mods for Napoleonic wars

You are appealing to a much more deminished population than if you built a mod for Warband. Why? dual forums.

Everyone knew the dual forum idea was a bad thing in the first place, but considering that Nw has no sustainability, aka its the same game over and over again no matter how you spin it with whichever modification. There is no new talent nor new things to explore with a mod. When you compare this to something like an ARMA game where you can have varying missions and bot tactics and then to pvp ... really there is nothing that NW holds up.

The melee was the key part in the warband engine, anything involving shooting just destroys this one key feature that warband has over most games ... basically more shooting just repeals it back to a state of "Battlefront 2" ... where most people would more than likely say "Yeh i'd rather play battlefront 2 again".

This new mod for NW will not last long, this is built off an old system that I beleive Wolfstar was working on before, it has more than likely evolved far from that but to me, it won't have that pop that Warband native can't sustain. If your mod does worse than a native version of the game, then your mod is pretty much useless.

[George385]

because we are special.

nah, seriously now, because they get boring after a while.. even though they were great mods, and i love them all, and i still play alot of them, they get boring or when the devs abandon them people just get bored, N&S was going fine up until when Hinkel stopped developing it to go work on WoR.

nothing lasts forever.

[Joseph Graham]

(considering its getting quite some critics on the taleworlds forum, it doesn't looks to well)

A lot of the criticism that is angled towards NW is the generally over-dramatic attitude that seems to be fairly common on these forums, the fact that we moved off of the forums in the first place and a general disdain for Flying Squirrel Entertainment. That said, the crew over at TaleWorlds seem to perform fairly well when it comes to moderation and the management of certain threads, like the Ban/Warn/Mute thread. Kator Viridian hit the nail on the head, though; Warband's population always has and always will exceed NWs by far.

Then there is (as mentioned previously) the extortionate cost of the Napoleonic Wars DLC. Given what you're getting it's hardly worth the investment when there are better and far more interesting modifications for Warband - the ASOFAI, the various Crusader-era modifications, L'Aigle, etc.

[Kator Viridian]

(considering its getting quite some critics on the taleworlds forum, it doesn't looks to well)

A lot of the criticism that is angled towards NW is the generally over-dramatic attitude that seems to be fairly common on these forums, the fact that we moved off of the forums in the first place and a general disdain for Flying Squirrel Entertainment. That said, the crew over at TaleWorlds seem to perform fairly well when it comes to moderation and the management of certain threads, like the Ban/Warn/Mute thread. Kator Viridian hit the nail on the head, though; Warband's population always has and always will exceed NWs by far.

Then there is (as mentioned previously) the extortionate cost of the Napoleonic Wars DLC. Given what you're getting it's hardly worth the investment when there are better and far more interesting modifications for Warband - the ASOFAI, the various Crusader-era modifications, L'Aigle, etc.

Here is how it is:

Cost of Warband is just Warband, Cost of NW is Warband plus NW.

Fortunatly I got my NW for free thanks to a hick up on steams part, which was rather helpful in letting me get Warband (Even though I had it), Mount and blade original (Which I had), With fire and Sword as well as NW ... for 30p less than NW was selling for. Couldn't say no to that and proceeded to buy it.

Warband offers a variety that NW cannot, to people who only have to buy one game. There will be a much smaller community for the game that FSE is creating for these simple facts:

No modability(that we know of) that NW players are used to.
Appealing to mainly NW players and re-enactors which will more than likely of already been appealed to.
The game looks pretty much the same gameplay as Warband/NW ... feel free to look at the gameplay pics and just scroll down thinking "NW" and you will just see NW with hyped up graphics from predicting what will happen next.

The new game offers very little and is just aiming for the same thing it always has.

Sorry but NW is not dead community wise but its spirit from the old MM days has been utterly crushed. There is no new life or thought process in the game, Events revolve around the same thing over and over again with nothing new to add. The game will slowly go down the drain until it is just the Die hards left.

Sorry but to me this game died a long long long time ago.

[Millander]

My opinion is that many mods simply are released not prepared. Yes for any mod there will be initial enthusiasm but itd the mods faults not the players if people dont stick. I dont mean to back any modders but I have seen a good amount of mods with their first releases being very poor and generally unfinished.

[Apollo]

My opinion is that many mods simply are released not prepared. Yes for any mod there will be initial enthusiasm but itd the mods faults not the players if people dont stick. I dont mean to back any modders but I have seen a good amount of mods with their first releases being very poor and generally unfinished.

+1. When the modders give a release date and do not meet it, whether due to something in real life, or they simply do not have it done, it lowers the hype.  However, if the mod is given a release date, and it is released on the appropriate date, but unfinished, then people have no reason to stick around because the modder has already given the players a reason not to trust them.  It is really about finding a balance between 1) releasing while the mod has popularity and 2) releasing the mod when it is both fun and playable.