Alright, thanks for your response.
Damn, RIP. That's a shame.
Servers crash as much as before, login servers are borked, disconnecting people constantly. Now I get a new *feature of 90% of the time I join a server I disconnect from the main lobby, and have to login again.
I agree with this general sentiment. I never really liked or disliked cRPG that much, but I definitely preferred Native Warband. Compared to Bannerlord Native, cRPG is far preferable even for people like me.
Bannerlord's Multiplayer scene is still somewhat tied to Warband, which Native never recieved proper attention from TaleWorlds. Given that it was a rather niche indie game when it came out in 2010, the 'penetration' of the market didn't happen in one big go. A lot of games these days get hyped, massive playerbases at launch, which depending on how good the game was then leads to either a fast or moderate decline in players/concurrent players on an order of 90%+ (99% in many cases) and the game never picks up momentum again. Warband's multiplayer never had that single massive push, in part because most people that play Mount & Blade do it for the scale and flexibility of the singleplayer (something which multiplayer simply doesn't have without significant modding). But it did have a consistent influx of players as more people discovered this somewhat niche indie game at different times, leading to a surprisingly consistent multiplayer population for most of the first decade. So right now it's a rather small (certainly small compared to singleplayer numbers, especially given just how bad Bannerlord multiplayer is - there still isn't open server access yet), but highly dedicated Mount & Blade MP playerbase. The vast majority of whom are either inactive waiting for MP to not be total rubbish, or still play Warband.
"Specialization" isn't what it used to be, though. Part of the problem lies there. Specifically, if you look at the sciences; the current scientific community has a catastrophic problem with replicating and verifying the results of other studies, with half of scientists surveyed here saying that they couldn't even replicate their own results. The academic community (who educates everyone) is difficult to trust when it can't even replicate it's own results. And the modern quasi-worship of 'science'("Trust the Science!" makes my blood boil for several different reasons), even though it has become so subverted by petty politics and big money, has created a strange set of social expectations which will make the aformentioned problems more difficult to resolve. That laymen are distrustful of specialization in the 21st century is less to do with the idiots outside of academia as it is to do with the idiots inside it, in my opinion. The internet sometimes providing incorrect counter-positions is merely a consequence of that, rather than the problem itself; especially since many of those counter-positions end up being correct in the end due to the inflexibility and incompetence of the system as a whole.
This.
Yeah, there was a stun, enough that if someone hit you, and they decided to swing again, you had no choice but to block. Near as I can tell (based on instinct, but the data may not exactly align) the stun in both games is more or less the same. Bannerlord just has all these extra slowdowns (combat speed slowdown, attack animation delay, the delay on block effect vs block animation, weapon textures being out of sync with the weapon hitbox, etc.) that make that same stun effect so much worse. Remove all of this extra garbage and I don't see a reason as to why stun should change at all.
These are the issues we brought up in the beginning, but TaleWorlds didn't listen. All specific problems aside: I don't enjoy the game, and what little enjoyment I do get from playing is nostalgia-based. If the choice is between playing the current configuration/combat system/class system, but with minor balance changes, OR not playing; after a few months I will end up choosing the latter. And I'm guessing that a significant share of the community or potential community (warband players waiting for the game to not be terrible before trying to play it) feel the same way. Choose your own equipment, reworking cavalry to make them balanced at default price, fixing the godawful melee mechanics, and resolving all of the lag/bug/server issues is the barest minimum for me. The first three of which TaleWorlds will never fix, meaning the community split has already happened, even if it hasn't fully manifested yet. Some degree of compromise between the various camps will have to happen or there won't be a multiplayer community at all 6 months after release.
Outside of duels, most melee fights have multiple people in them. Due to the block delay, attack delay, and directional shield blocking, in addition to the stun, if you're stuck in a 1vX fight against players of moderate skill or higher, you just get stunned to death with no hope of survival. In Warband, fighting multiple people was difficult and usually involved you dying, but at least there were avenues available to skilled players, who found themselves in that situation, to survive or win. Now it's an autoloss if they don't teamhit each other. Skill is the primary factor still, but you're more shackled to poorly designed/implemented game mechanics outside your control than before that makes many situations downright unplayable.