The reasons why I stopped playing:
- Lack of updates means smell of dead mod. And no one wants to invest in the community of a dead mod.
- While the mod showed promise and appealed to the NW style of RPer / player, development was halted several times and incredibly poorly designed maps made it very frustrating to play. For instance, we spent a long time on New Spain. Add very frustrating glitches and bugs and you will have anxiety inducing mechanics that can only be tolerated for a little while, not for months without perspective of ending any time.
- Lack of reliable bank and gear saving. Which is something PW players are used to. People, I include myself, felt that "working" was useless given the constant crashes and resets and high gold drops. This resulted in players not wanting to invest effort and be frustrated by engaging in more productive / constructive activities. Just grab a gun and shoot / troll was the common advice.
- Plenty of trolls, not so many active community members. While the servers were populated for a while, a large proportion of them were ancient PW players that came with the promise of no rule and hence mass randoming with outlaws. For months, that is all we saw, outlaws vs the colony was 3/4 of the action.
Overall, I feel this created a downward spiral were more creative members abandoned the mod and the proportion of trolls - jackasses to decent players reached intolerable levels.
retired Colonel Erk of the Hearts of Oak
http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,280349.0.html