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.
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.
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.
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.
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.