TW doesn't care about it. Adding skins or battle pass won't make the game any better.
You're right that TW doesn't seem to care. I am sure that some devs care, but the higher ups seem like they don't care. I'm guessing that's because from a business perspective, there's not much reason to care about MP.
MP is treated like a slapped on component to SP, and the priority list seems to be simply checking boxes of what needs to be in MP based on a plan made a while ago. Thanks to the efforts of Nin3, the combat parameters and game balance were adjusted and improved over time, but always in small increments. And at least in the case of combat parameters, literally held back by SP hardcoding for the ridiculous swing radius and I'm sure other things as well.
At the moment, it seems like the 1.7.2 MP patch is completed, but has been held back by SP for weeks now. This is just speculation of course, and it isn't impossible that some horrific MP bugs were discovered that are slowing down SP. But I'm guessing it's the other way round.
A cheaper, separate MP, would allow more autonomy and more focus on MP. In other words, encouraging TW's overall approach to the game to focus more on MP instead of being an afterthought.
How is Brandis a forum moderator when he says things like this, "If TW is incompetent and would only hire/assign incompetent people to MP, then yes, obviously F2P would fail in the same way the original approach has. "
Your level of tact is as incompetent as you believe their game design to be.
As five bucks pointed out, "if" is critical to that sentence. It was a hypothetical in response to someone else's comment.
To clarify: my opinion is that MP devs have overall been good, but due to lack of resources, can't do much. That's obviously complete speculation. Nin3 could have browsed Reddit all day and made random interns do his work, however, we can be fairly certain that's not the case.
I'm intentionally saying that public-facing devs have been fine, while blaming unnamed "higher ups."
Also, forum moderators are not affiliated with TaleWorlds.
Going F2P would make MP a hellscape with people constantly getting new accounts to evade punishments.
Sell MP at 15€, maybe 10 on a sale every once in a while coinciding with a F2P weekend. Not sure what to do about SP pricing, lowering it a tad and still including MP would probably be the best?
I'm not sure new factions or new classes wouldn't be too much, but maybe they can do something like a rotation.
Yeah that definitely would be a problem with F2P. $5 to $15 would maybe be a good range.
I think most factions have a quite a bit of room for new classes. There's a lot of archtypes to be explored, and enough weapon/perk diversity to keep adding new ones before factions feel too similar.