It's funny, a few people keep defending the class system, saying it's more "accessible" and more "casual".
I convinced a few friends to play Bannerlord skirmish with me yesterday, they played a very small amount of warband multiplayer before. All 5 of them first reaction : "WTF Why? Why is this so limited compared to the previous game?", literally none of them liked it. They are all pretty bad at the game still, but it took them basically two games to figure out how unbalanced things are and how they should all play armored archer or cav. They all enjoy single player and they are all used to being able to recruit any troop they want, equip whatever they feel like and create their own loadout. Isn't that one of the big reason why people love M&B?
For some reason, some people keep thinking that casual players are a bunch of idiots or something? They are not dumb, they just don't have the time to become quite as poficient as us dirty basement nerds, but M&B is a difficult game either way and multiplayer will never cater to the non competitive players. And the casual competitive players don't want a dumbed down system. It doesn't make the game more "accessible", it just makes it less customizable and new players will just get bored of it more quickly since they have less things to learn/experiment with. And right now, it also means that we are at the mercy of TW balancing team : since 99% of those class loadout are garbage, everyone is playing the exact same one and the game is 100% cav and archer spam. Very fun for new players, yes.
Of course mods and community servers will all fix this, but I am just worried it will be way too late and that in 6 months when all this get out there, most newer players will have had a terrible experience and will never want to come back. Hell, multiplayer is already dead and the game just released.
I have 37 friends in my steam list who own Bannerlord. They all tried multiplayer at least once. None of them still play it. My closer IRL friends (10 of them) reaction when I ask them if they liked the class system, without exception : "EW".