I was going to ignore this but no, It's hilarious to see there are still some people that are advising others what to do as if they know what they are talking about or authority to shut down people.
First of all, let's start with this:
Are those "whining" people insulting anyone? Are they cursing? Are they violating any forum rules? No. Did they pay for this game? Do they have all right to say/express however they feel in the forum? Yes. So they can say whatever they like.
When you claim people are "whining" it is simply triggering toxic behaviour in the forum. Also, people
don't have to provide constructive criticism. They
don't have to feel okay with this EA mess. They
don't have to test the game and feel "oh okay" with every bug as if they are QA. You don't like what people say? Scroll down and continue.
I won't go into your irrelevant comparison with CoD, because it's pointless. But let's take another example, let's talk about Warband. First Mount&Blade game released in 2008. Warband released in 2010. After 2 years. 2 years of development. They were both sandboxes, they were both same game mechanics. Warband was superior to first M&B. Warband was their first Multiplayer experience, they didn't even had know-how. Yet, it was way better than Bannerlord's current state when it first came out. Was it perfect? Oh no, it was bad. But it was better than Bannerlord as first state. Bannerlord took 8+ years of development. Eight years. People have all right to say
What the hell when you make people wait for 8+ years and showcase lots of stuff beforehand in your blogs, which wasn't included in the release or polished ( by polishing, I mean like, it feels like literally no QA tested smithing for example )
When a bunch of untrained modders starts to tweak your game, fixes your issues, polishes your features within same time range where you, as a company, add really weird unnecessary features, then people have all right to complain and "whine". Because it basically shows that you are either ignoring people's complains or you are not putting the effort that you should put into your own game. I mean Bannerlord doesn't have banners in the game officially for god's sake, stop using EA or Sandbox-complexity to defend this weirdness.
Even Taleworlds is not defending themselves about this. Taleworlds is a company and they have an internal roadmap. Doesn't matter if we like it or not. They have it and they are following it. You can effect that only with expressing your concerns about the game. You can say it's full of crap. This is a feedback for them as well. If they feel like why you are saying that, they can ask more information. And that's what Arda and others are trying to do nowadays. But if everyone all the sudden stops giving feedback or "whining" they can assume everything is alright. Because apparently they though in this way before releasing this half-product.
Regardless to that, numbers are crystal clear. Stats are going down. And they are aware of that now. And that's why they wanted to fix their codebase so that adding or fixing new stuff won't become more and more problematic after each patch.
If you still feel like you want to defend that claim, good luck with explaining already lost 238,898 players
how hard to make a sandbox game because it's not call of duty
