Right now though, I firmly believe that the state of multiplayer is actively killing the potential for the community to develop, and when we get to the point where TW wants to work on the experience, the community will be irreparably damaged.
How so tho? Many of the players have already quit the game temporarily until the game is fixed. Shutting down the game completely is what will cause the death of the community. The few remaining players who actually play the game will stand and vouch for improvements and progress. Shutting down a game completely drops the player count to 0 and I guarantee you that this is a slap to the face to the players who still play this game. A complete shutdown is just not going to fix it, and what's likely going to happen is a very disappointing result that would make people actually quit the mount and blade franchise.
Feedback is not as critical as the changes that this game needs to undergo are massive and fundamental. Not simple tweaks. There is enough feedback on this forum and elsewhere to explain these fundamental changes in great detail.
Regarding this point the analytics are important, you need players to test the game. We know for a fact that every time they try to introduce something the game breaks. So we need people who can send those crash reports and explain the bugs and exploits in the game. The devs are active, while slow and not effective they are still getting results eventually. While arguably it is worse of I really do not know how the game is worse off after they refactored the code but it is what it is. For any form of testing for changes good or bad the developers need someone to play test the game and see how it goes. This is important when you consider A/B testing being a crucial methodology when analyzing user experience simply skipping this will be the developers doing changes with no idea if these changes will break the game or not. Many times the developers can introduce something and this one thing will be used in a way that is not meant to be used at all.
Perhaps veterans and die hard players will, but those new players who contributed to the massive sales during release will never return. Like it or not, we need those players, and if we can save even a small amount of them, it will vastly contribute to this niche community.
I can't talk about the entire community but for NA the problems were the servers and the split that killed NA. Other communities are Poppin and I think the reason why the community is not doing well is bad engagement and outreach. This is very evident when it comes to SA especially since they do not have a server to begin with.
A good recovery plan and come back for games come with good community outreach, communication, and most importantly great results. People will give it a fair shot if a lot of fixes and changes do come. Bannerlord online got a lot of players when it released because people noticed something different and if people notice that MP is actually popping and tournaments are a thing now the sheer pressure will let the newer player come back. If NoManSky dev team managed to pull off a comeback then bannerlord def can. They just need to focus on the real things and meme us with BS UI updates that actually make the game worse.
Bannerlord MP is dead because you got less than a handful of people working on the other half of the game. The updates that we get in the patch notes are not considered updates but instead just value changes that an entry-level intern can change. The last significant update we had was the removal of block delay.