“Is BkS coming back for Bannerlord?”
Admittedly, the question still makes me smile, even though I’ve heard it more often than I can count over the past few years, from a large array of different groups. I was always somewhat cagey with my response, adopting a wait-and-see approach and keeping on eye on development, hoping the issues I had with Warband would see corrections. However, given the most recent report from Callum and the information released from the developers, I’m going to answer that question directly and shortly: No.
And now, I’m going to give a longer, constructive reason as to why, with particular attention given to the decision to remove Battle and knowingly and willingly alienate an entire subsection of their community.
No, because TaleWorlds, for years, has left the competitive community on an island. A glaring lack of concern for balance updates, a noted apathy towards community interaction, and a complete lack of visibility from the perspective of the dedicated community around the game to address problems as they arose. Instead, we, the community, took matters into our own hands by using the sand on the island they had left us on, and we used that sand to create solutions, to host our own tournaments, to even start our own production teams and produce excellent content surrounding our competitive scene. We solved balance issues by imposing rule sets that circumvented the issues the team left present for 5+ years. We rallied around Warband with a devout following that I’d describe as nothing short of absolutely passionate. We bolstered TaleWorld’s lack of marketing and advertising by doing our best to advertise for them ourselves by word of mouth. We went to other games and were sure, as we did, to link them to videos that groups like Bladecast had produced. We made an entire community site around the competitive Battle scene, complete with wiki information detailing individual players, all the way down to preferred play styles, histories, and more. We kept servers up out of our own pockets for Battle -- what the community at large played -- in lieu of any sort of official TaleWorlds server. We. Us.
No, because We have been told that TaleWorlds now knows what’s best for us. They tell us we don’t need sand anymore and they’re going to take away our ability to choose from those who have stood by them the longest. They have told us that they can make our decisions; all the way down from what mode we should play as a competitive community, to that we don’t need to even be able to select our own equipment in said mode. They have taken away our preferred game mode when, as a programmer, I see no forced reason to stop TaleWorlds from retaining the mode and shipping Bannerlord with it included and letting the *community* decide instead of treating us like children and deciding for us. I find it unacceptable and incredibly short-sighted.
No, because past the fundamental disagreement I have with this on principal, I don’t agree with it in applied practice, either. Surely, I don’t expect clones as games iterate and advance. Mount&Blade and Mount&Blade:Warband, I played both extensively, and they were cousins. I appreciate the advances made, but I also appreciate that the game kept the same spirit. The proposed changes here, this isn’t in the same family, and is a clear attempt to reach out towards games like For Honor or more MOBA-esque games. Warband occupies a certain space in the industry, and I feel like these types of decisions are being made without the understanding that these are the things that makes a game wander too far in the search of “different” to the point that it loses some of the identity that used to make it great. This extremely competitive industry is littered with the broken remains of those games that went on that fool’s errand. Sometimes we, as people, get a little too wrapped up in things like that and we need to be told by people around us what’s going on from an objective perspective: You are Mount&Blade, and you are not acting very Mount&Blade like. A forced team size, respawns, and taking away the larger tactical decisions of true gear selection is something that I don’t think any Mount&Blade game can rightfully include. I can't imagine a single Battle player out there who likes the idea of having multiple respawns a round; it takes away so much of the enjoyment of the game. That is a deal breaker by itself.
No, because the sentiment that we “should all just wait and see what this new game mode has to offer before making decisions” is fundamentally flawed, because even if I were to do that, I don’t need to see your new game mode to see that the stark fact still remains that you are removing a game mode you don’t need to remove unnecessarily, regardless of your intent or what your new game mode is trying to achieve. Even if you think that you know what is best for the competitive community, they should still have the ability to choose. You are alienating a large group of players that you don’t need to and yet you press on all the same. The argument then follows that Battle can be “modded in,” and is laughable at best. The community thought that the matchmaking mod was a good idea, and I told them then in no uncertain terms that requiring a mod is going to segment the community and restrict newer players from making their way into the scene organically: succinctly, a barrier to entry. A community cannot thrive if the throughput (input - output) is not positive, and when the input is so small due to the barrier to entry that deters most people from even attempting to play, that’s an issue. It's an objective fact that after the scene started using the mod heavily, the influx of new players dropped heavily as the public servers everyone used to play on that new guys would wander into all fell into nothingness because the scene moved to a third party application, seeing it stagnate and languish with little to no new members because of it. DayZ has been cited, but that is anecdotal and the exception and the competitive scene for the last year in NA is an example of what the many rules look like. I recall Balion's attempt at making ProMod, as we volunteered to help test and provide feedback, with the intent of addressing glaring balance problems neglected for years. Ultimately, we ran into the same issue already discussed here: the vast majority of people weren't willing to go through the hassle of figuring out how to download and install a mod when they can simply play other parts of the game just fine and put up with whatever is going on.
Don’t mistake me: we do miss Warband. We have been around since the very beginning, and are still here. At the end of the day, I feel like the multiplayer community -- specifically the competitive scene -- is reminiscent of what you’d expect of family, in a certain light. We argue, we fight, we have people we pick on, we argue about whether NA or EU is better (sup AE), but we rally together when one of us are truly threatened. Today, I feel like our collective futures we were so patiently and expectantly looking towards in regards to Bannerlord are gravely threatened by this absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary design decision, alienating all of us. I’m upset, my guys are upset, my Discord is upset, my community is upset. To show that in a “constructive” manner as profanity is apparently frowned upon in this establishment, I wrote this post in the hope that I could encapsulate the feelings of frustration our entire community is feeling and express them clearly. You may not like me, nor BkS, and while I may not speak for all of us on every point here, I do think I speak a little bit for all of us here, so, I’m asking all of us to spread #nobattlenobks to our forum headings and to as many places as necessary while adhering to forum rules in representation of our frustration, to make it visible that you're with us in the stand we're making with light armor and a short spear versus heavily armored cavalry with no reason to stop coming this way.
However, I’m not one to come and simply complain without providing solutions, because I believe that is pointless and childish. Ideally, Battle can still ship with the game and the game can actually be balanced enough to where we don’t need to modify anything. Past that, if Skirmish mode is really our only option, then consider allowing us more control over things like equipment, as well as modifying team size. Reconsider the notion that players should respawn multiples times a round. Actually have that conversation with the people who have been playing the game for 6+ years now. Allow us to have more input into what Skirmish entails if you’re not going to allow us to have Battle instead of force-feeding us what you happen to think is best, because any leader knows that his strength comes from those around him and bringing out their best. We’ve been trying to give you our best and here I sit, still doing it -- and diplomatically -- in the attempt to see the same thing happen we all want: Bannerlord a success in every way. But, I’m not sorry to say I’d never consider the game a success if you need to treat your loyal community so roughly and sell out the game’s identity while in effect telling us to shut up and sit down while you decide what mode the scene needs and not caring what the scene itself has to say, handing out bans and mutes to anyone who disagrees. Surely, Bannerlord is bigger than competitive play, and is bigger than multiplayer, but you don't need to destroy something to add something else, so I have to ask, why are you still deciding to do that? I've yet to hear a fair answer. I'll be here if you find one in your design meetings behind closed doors.
#nobattlenobks
Admittedly, the question still makes me smile, even though I’ve heard it more often than I can count over the past few years, from a large array of different groups. I was always somewhat cagey with my response, adopting a wait-and-see approach and keeping on eye on development, hoping the issues I had with Warband would see corrections. However, given the most recent report from Callum and the information released from the developers, I’m going to answer that question directly and shortly: No.
And now, I’m going to give a longer, constructive reason as to why, with particular attention given to the decision to remove Battle and knowingly and willingly alienate an entire subsection of their community.
No, because TaleWorlds, for years, has left the competitive community on an island. A glaring lack of concern for balance updates, a noted apathy towards community interaction, and a complete lack of visibility from the perspective of the dedicated community around the game to address problems as they arose. Instead, we, the community, took matters into our own hands by using the sand on the island they had left us on, and we used that sand to create solutions, to host our own tournaments, to even start our own production teams and produce excellent content surrounding our competitive scene. We solved balance issues by imposing rule sets that circumvented the issues the team left present for 5+ years. We rallied around Warband with a devout following that I’d describe as nothing short of absolutely passionate. We bolstered TaleWorld’s lack of marketing and advertising by doing our best to advertise for them ourselves by word of mouth. We went to other games and were sure, as we did, to link them to videos that groups like Bladecast had produced. We made an entire community site around the competitive Battle scene, complete with wiki information detailing individual players, all the way down to preferred play styles, histories, and more. We kept servers up out of our own pockets for Battle -- what the community at large played -- in lieu of any sort of official TaleWorlds server. We. Us.
No, because We have been told that TaleWorlds now knows what’s best for us. They tell us we don’t need sand anymore and they’re going to take away our ability to choose from those who have stood by them the longest. They have told us that they can make our decisions; all the way down from what mode we should play as a competitive community, to that we don’t need to even be able to select our own equipment in said mode. They have taken away our preferred game mode when, as a programmer, I see no forced reason to stop TaleWorlds from retaining the mode and shipping Bannerlord with it included and letting the *community* decide instead of treating us like children and deciding for us. I find it unacceptable and incredibly short-sighted.
No, because past the fundamental disagreement I have with this on principal, I don’t agree with it in applied practice, either. Surely, I don’t expect clones as games iterate and advance. Mount&Blade and Mount&Blade:Warband, I played both extensively, and they were cousins. I appreciate the advances made, but I also appreciate that the game kept the same spirit. The proposed changes here, this isn’t in the same family, and is a clear attempt to reach out towards games like For Honor or more MOBA-esque games. Warband occupies a certain space in the industry, and I feel like these types of decisions are being made without the understanding that these are the things that makes a game wander too far in the search of “different” to the point that it loses some of the identity that used to make it great. This extremely competitive industry is littered with the broken remains of those games that went on that fool’s errand. Sometimes we, as people, get a little too wrapped up in things like that and we need to be told by people around us what’s going on from an objective perspective: You are Mount&Blade, and you are not acting very Mount&Blade like. A forced team size, respawns, and taking away the larger tactical decisions of true gear selection is something that I don’t think any Mount&Blade game can rightfully include. I can't imagine a single Battle player out there who likes the idea of having multiple respawns a round; it takes away so much of the enjoyment of the game. That is a deal breaker by itself.
No, because the sentiment that we “should all just wait and see what this new game mode has to offer before making decisions” is fundamentally flawed, because even if I were to do that, I don’t need to see your new game mode to see that the stark fact still remains that you are removing a game mode you don’t need to remove unnecessarily, regardless of your intent or what your new game mode is trying to achieve. Even if you think that you know what is best for the competitive community, they should still have the ability to choose. You are alienating a large group of players that you don’t need to and yet you press on all the same. The argument then follows that Battle can be “modded in,” and is laughable at best. The community thought that the matchmaking mod was a good idea, and I told them then in no uncertain terms that requiring a mod is going to segment the community and restrict newer players from making their way into the scene organically: succinctly, a barrier to entry. A community cannot thrive if the throughput (input - output) is not positive, and when the input is so small due to the barrier to entry that deters most people from even attempting to play, that’s an issue. It's an objective fact that after the scene started using the mod heavily, the influx of new players dropped heavily as the public servers everyone used to play on that new guys would wander into all fell into nothingness because the scene moved to a third party application, seeing it stagnate and languish with little to no new members because of it. DayZ has been cited, but that is anecdotal and the exception and the competitive scene for the last year in NA is an example of what the many rules look like. I recall Balion's attempt at making ProMod, as we volunteered to help test and provide feedback, with the intent of addressing glaring balance problems neglected for years. Ultimately, we ran into the same issue already discussed here: the vast majority of people weren't willing to go through the hassle of figuring out how to download and install a mod when they can simply play other parts of the game just fine and put up with whatever is going on.
Don’t mistake me: we do miss Warband. We have been around since the very beginning, and are still here. At the end of the day, I feel like the multiplayer community -- specifically the competitive scene -- is reminiscent of what you’d expect of family, in a certain light. We argue, we fight, we have people we pick on, we argue about whether NA or EU is better (sup AE), but we rally together when one of us are truly threatened. Today, I feel like our collective futures we were so patiently and expectantly looking towards in regards to Bannerlord are gravely threatened by this absolutely ridiculous and unnecessary design decision, alienating all of us. I’m upset, my guys are upset, my Discord is upset, my community is upset. To show that in a “constructive” manner as profanity is apparently frowned upon in this establishment, I wrote this post in the hope that I could encapsulate the feelings of frustration our entire community is feeling and express them clearly. You may not like me, nor BkS, and while I may not speak for all of us on every point here, I do think I speak a little bit for all of us here, so, I’m asking all of us to spread #nobattlenobks to our forum headings and to as many places as necessary while adhering to forum rules in representation of our frustration, to make it visible that you're with us in the stand we're making with light armor and a short spear versus heavily armored cavalry with no reason to stop coming this way.
However, I’m not one to come and simply complain without providing solutions, because I believe that is pointless and childish. Ideally, Battle can still ship with the game and the game can actually be balanced enough to where we don’t need to modify anything. Past that, if Skirmish mode is really our only option, then consider allowing us more control over things like equipment, as well as modifying team size. Reconsider the notion that players should respawn multiples times a round. Actually have that conversation with the people who have been playing the game for 6+ years now. Allow us to have more input into what Skirmish entails if you’re not going to allow us to have Battle instead of force-feeding us what you happen to think is best, because any leader knows that his strength comes from those around him and bringing out their best. We’ve been trying to give you our best and here I sit, still doing it -- and diplomatically -- in the attempt to see the same thing happen we all want: Bannerlord a success in every way. But, I’m not sorry to say I’d never consider the game a success if you need to treat your loyal community so roughly and sell out the game’s identity while in effect telling us to shut up and sit down while you decide what mode the scene needs and not caring what the scene itself has to say, handing out bans and mutes to anyone who disagrees. Surely, Bannerlord is bigger than competitive play, and is bigger than multiplayer, but you don't need to destroy something to add something else, so I have to ask, why are you still deciding to do that? I've yet to hear a fair answer. I'll be here if you find one in your design meetings behind closed doors.
#nobattlenobks
)
