I actually took a hiatus from the game, maybe 4-5 months, and only got back into it recently. MP was still pretty wonky, but I was actually having a good time (thanks largely to a lack of cav spam lol), but I remembered the servers being generally stabilized, or at least, well enough so that I could comfortably play for an few hours with 50+ people. Whole reason I made the post was the crashing this Saturday was incessant and I was drunk and angry. Obviously it's been a problem since launch, but I really thought that they'd overcome the hurtle well enough by now.
I'm basically theorizing that TW is just trying to get all the pieces out of the box and onto the table before they actually bother putting the puzzle together. If MP is dead now, they can just get themselves sorted before the official launch and hope that a fresh reminder of the game's existence revitalizes the player base. If that's their plan, I hope it works, but the two-year anniversary of early access is rapidly approaching and the MP is still dwarfed by Napoleonic Wars and even Warband, which is completely ridiculous for a game that's already spent the better part of a decade in development.
