Do you MP veterans mind reinstating what exactly is wrong with classes? Having played a little bit of both Warband MP and Bannerlord MP, I can feel the systems are different, but not that one is inherently worse than the others.
It's more restrictive, sure. But whether you have 1 option to pick out of 2, or 1 option to pick out of 3.000.000, sooner or later everyone will gravitate to a state of maximum efficiency, picking that one most efficient option over all others, regardless of how many unpicked ones there are. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that in truth players with 5k hours in Warband MP ended up picking roughly the same sets of stuff for specific playstyles they enjoyed, not making a random assortment of items for customization's sake.
It depends on what people are trying to do.
Competitive play universally sees people gravitate towards the most optimal build. It doesn't matter what kind of class/customization system is in play. Hypothetically: if Bannerlord was in a polished state as of right now, then in competitive play nobody would ever pick 2h infantry(no shield against archers which are much stronger than their warband counterparts), nobody would willingly pick the peasant, nobody would ever pick the light skirmisher infantry. There's also the thing about Warband where the competitive community universally banned Khergits, not because they're unbalanced, but because nobody wants to play against Horse Archers, so hypothetically if a competitive community arose, Horse Archers would be banned as a class selection as well (I would advocate for it). So in the end most of the class system as it is now is essentially useless as well. And of those classes, there is so few customization options, and even then they're put into two specific categories, which means one is always going to be that much better than the others in each selection. Bannerlord's 'optimized' play is in an even more restrictive and limited viable equipment options while being even less balanced. There will always be that one selection that is stronger than the other, meaning that Bannerlord's premade class system suffers the same flaw(and always will) as Warband's equipment selection, but it then adds the problems highlighted below that didn't exist in Warband.
As for casual play: who actually spams the most optimal equipment in a pub server? Playing around with less than optimal equipment choices, and fun strange loadouts, is half the game. If you're using the exact same loadout constantly, the game gets tedious, even in Warband. But all of the other strange and less optimal loadouts/weapons make the game interesting, not only for the sake of improving your skill, but for raw fun. All of this is simply not there in Bannerlord, leading to people getting seriously bored very quickly. Only a few people on my friends list play Bannerlord at all anymore, with the poorly designed combat mechanics and this terrible class system being the equally cited reasons as to why, when I asked a number of them. One can forgive a lot about an unpolished and unbalanced game, if the player has the agency to customize the way they play, and create playstyles and loadouts that fit their personality and mindset, leading to a plethora of otherwise unoptimized loadouts flourishing in pubs in Warband. This simply doesn't exist in Bannerlord, where you're forced into cookie cutter options that ruin all of the creativity and fun of experimenting with different and wacky loadouts.
If you have the time and you want a full list of the issues people have with the class system, I suggest you read through the hundreds of pages people have typed out on this forum about the issue. The key issue is of course that this new system
stops people from being able to play in the way that they want to play. Which is by itself reason enough, especially in an RPG.
Fair enough. Is dismantling the class system in all its entirety the only way around it, though?
Unfortunately, the two systems are close to an antithesis of the other. They're completely different and completely incompatible. Which is why the gamemodes designed for Warband's class system (Siege, Duel, Battle, TDM) are so completely out of place with this class system. Pretty much everyone can agree that the new class system works for Captain's Mode, and I doubt almost anyone is calling for it to be removed from that. We've been asking for TaleWorlds to compromise by either creating a New custom class option that exists within this class system, where the premade selections still exist, while giving those people that want it the option to customize their class, OR by creating two different, parallel class systems, and keeping the existing premade classes for Captain's Mode, while creating a Warband-esque class system for Battle/Siege/Duel/TDM. Both were met with zero response.
