As user
Aboud2195 clearly demonstrated, MP accounts for roughly 5% of the playerbase. Yes, that is 4% more than what I wrote, but also ~15-20% less than what some people in this thread claim. 5%, this is a small minority at best.
We can also look at achivement statistics on Steam. The top 5 most common achivements are
1) Community service (54.6%)
2) Get up Stand up (51.9%)
3) Good Samaritan (49.2%)
4) Abundant Feast (47.2%)
5) Talking helps (47%)
The first MP achievement, "
Every breath you take", appears for the first time at place
43) with only (14.1%) of players having completed it.
Some conclusions we can draw from this are; roughly only half of players who have bought the game have at some point played the game under circumstances when Steam achievements can be earned, and completed the top five most common activities in the game.
Now, very likely it's more than roughly half who have done those things, only they weren't playing through Steam when they did so. And since some mods require you to start the game through another launcher, and since a mod-related achievement is the #1 achievement on Steam, we can likely conclude that it is in fact a much larger % of people who have completed those five top achivements listed on Steam than roughly half the people who own the game through Steam, I'd wager closer to 75%.
Some more conclusions we can draw: Roughly 14 out of 100 people (~14%) have at some point
played and finished a match in Multiplayer. This is more than 5%. But the 5% user Aboud2195 found was only for one specific point in time, while the achivement could've been earned at any point in time prior to the next second.
More than half of Multiplayer-related achivements have closer to 1-5% completion rate, while less than half of Multiplayer-related achivements have at most 14% completion rate. The type of achievements that are around 1-5% completion rate are those that require you to kill X amount of people with Y type of weapon, while the achievements that have at most 14% are the types that require you to play one match, win one match, etc. .
The proof that solidifies the ~1-5% number: The multiplayer achivements that require more than winning/playing one match have a completion rate of around 1-5%.
And considering the numbers we've gone through earlier, we can safely conclude that the multiplayer population of Warband that
consistently plays multiplayer accounts for at most ~5% of the playerbase but very likely closer to 2-3% since most multiplayer achivements have a completion rate of lower than 5%.
And if 5% of the playerbase consistently played multiplayer than we would see most of the multiplayer achivements have atleast 5% completion rate, when this is not the case.
It is in fact the case that 3 multiplayer achivements have less than 2% completion rate.
Meanwhile, somewhere around ~10-20% of the playerbase have at some point tried playing Multiplayer atleast once.
TLDR: 2-3% of the Warband playerbase
consistently play Multiplayer, ~15% have played Multiplayer
once.
Let's put the discussion about the popularity of Multiplayer to rest now.