As it stands, multiplayer in Bannerlord isn't doing too hot. It seems to me that neither seasoned veterans, nor new players can find enjoyment or a reason to stick around. While many people have already explained why class systems, combat mechanics, and the lack of private servers are a problem, I think that the problem may also extend to our offering of gamemodes. More specifically, the exclusion of the best one. If you want a tl;dr: skirmish mode is hostile to new players, and battle offers public players the best shot at a competitive game which they can enjoy.
To start, I’ll explain why I think skirmish is especially anti-pub and anti-new, then show how battle mitigates the issues inherent to skirmish. I think an easy way to explain Bannerlord skirmish’s problems is to compare it to an analogue. When I imagine a 6v6 gamemode, one which is also well optimized for esports, the first thing that comes to mind is CSGO competitive. Both focus on teamwork, include small engagements, and are pretty skill intensive. However, whereas CSGO’s scene is still vibrant, Bannerlord’s queues are perennially empty, and that’s after a month of play. What went wrong? Put simply, such gamemodes rely on both teams having comparable skill, and Bannerlord can’t provide that promise. The reason for that is Bannerlord’s multiplayer is inherently niche, while CSGO or R6 are massive franchises with far larger player bases. In those games, when someone new decides to solo queue, there will be similarly skilled players that MMR can sort them with. They end up fighting with and against people they stand a chance against, and having fun. However, if their communities were as small as ours, they’d have to fight global elites, or a team far worse than them, and suffer. In Bannerlord, this reality is noticeable. We can see that 6 stacks are getting tired of pubstomping, and pubs now instinctively quit when they see a 6 stack. The consequence of this has been that veterans and clans got burned out, and pubs uninstalled, never to play again. I’m sorry to say, but unless Bannerlord becomes a critically acclaimed FPS franchise, this issue will persist -- the community won't be big enough to entertain this system.
Even if we ignored this matchmaking issue, however, skirmish’s structure remains deeply unrewarding. This is due to two factors: small engagements, and the presence of respawns. I’m sure we’ve all noticed that the leaderboards on our skirmishes often look like this:
The values are almost always skewed, with one or two “carries” tearing up the enemy on each side, and a set of bystanders. How is this related to skirmish’s structure? Firstly, in such small confrontations, differences in skill have a disproportionate effect on outcomes. One bad or uncooperative teammate constitutes a loss of 15% of your fighting strength. Conversely, one comparatively good teammate means 15% of your team is “elite.” Not only that, the death of another team’s carry has little consequences for that team, because they have the potential to respawn (sometimes 3 times in a round). This means that one good player can (and often does) stomp the other team, and one bad player can cost a round through their ineptitude. The system exaggerates skill differentials, and that makes for consistently imbalanced matches.
How then does battle mitigate these issues? Firstly, the fights are far larger, and so skill differentials even out and become less significant. Having a bad regiment or clan assigned to your side in a battle wasn’t a death sentence, even if they made up 20% of your team. There’s a lot of structural reasons for this, one is that larger battles allow new players to pick and choose their fights. They can follow large blobs (a form of teamwork which is unlikely to be achievable in skirmish), and they have the option to blend into a crowd, rather than be forced into suicidal 1v1's. Moreover, losing 50% of your team in a battle simply doesn’t hurt as much as it does in skirmish. Whereas a 3v6 can be brutal (and is inevitable in skirmish once such losses are achieved), players in battle can still have a large group with which to fight, and a 10v20 is far easier to win than, say, a 2v4. This is why carries were far harder to find in battle.
While we’re on the topic of carries, here’s my second reason for why battle is better: deaths matter. If I were to get a lucky kill on say, Beeflip, a player who terrifies me, then he’s gone for this round. There’s a sense of accomplishment associated with this, and it has a tangible (if small) effect on the battle. The chance of him tearing me up is gone, and I can continue to fight without fearing that he’ll reappear this round and smack me. As someone who played Warband battles extensively, and was very bad, this was what kept me going. I had a chance to win; my victories, however small, felt consequential. Furthermore, I got a chance to immerse myself in a competitive, hard fought situation, but I wasn’t ever responsible for winning or losing it. In other words, the wins felt sweeter, and the losses were less bitter. I don’t envy the pubs who get a lucky kill on an OG player, only to have him respawn and “nothing personnel, kid” them. And I'm sorry for those players who feel personally responsible for losing to a VK 6 stack, solely because they were the 15% of the team who couldn’t get a kill. These things didn’t happen in battle, and they allowed the players who weren’t good but wanted to experience a competitive and cutthroat fight to do so.
If Taleworlds really wants to cater to new and casual players, they need to understand that casual refers to the extent to which they play the game, not the kind of fights that they want. Deathmatch and siege are all well and good, but there are pubs and newbies who clearly crave a hard-fought win, rather than a moshpit of sword swings. If you want evidence of this, look at the absolute masochists still playing skirmish. To them, “casual” means that they don’t want to waste their lives mashing rmb to block, not that they hate a challenge in a video game. So please, TW, recognize that there are new and low skill members of our community who want to play something “hardcore,” and that skirmish is inherently hostile to them. Implementing a battle mode would be the best move towards properly including our new players in the fun that the sweaty side of Bannerlord can be, and so I hope you consider it
Signed,
former_casual_player_28
To start, I’ll explain why I think skirmish is especially anti-pub and anti-new, then show how battle mitigates the issues inherent to skirmish. I think an easy way to explain Bannerlord skirmish’s problems is to compare it to an analogue. When I imagine a 6v6 gamemode, one which is also well optimized for esports, the first thing that comes to mind is CSGO competitive. Both focus on teamwork, include small engagements, and are pretty skill intensive. However, whereas CSGO’s scene is still vibrant, Bannerlord’s queues are perennially empty, and that’s after a month of play. What went wrong? Put simply, such gamemodes rely on both teams having comparable skill, and Bannerlord can’t provide that promise. The reason for that is Bannerlord’s multiplayer is inherently niche, while CSGO or R6 are massive franchises with far larger player bases. In those games, when someone new decides to solo queue, there will be similarly skilled players that MMR can sort them with. They end up fighting with and against people they stand a chance against, and having fun. However, if their communities were as small as ours, they’d have to fight global elites, or a team far worse than them, and suffer. In Bannerlord, this reality is noticeable. We can see that 6 stacks are getting tired of pubstomping, and pubs now instinctively quit when they see a 6 stack. The consequence of this has been that veterans and clans got burned out, and pubs uninstalled, never to play again. I’m sorry to say, but unless Bannerlord becomes a critically acclaimed FPS franchise, this issue will persist -- the community won't be big enough to entertain this system.
Even if we ignored this matchmaking issue, however, skirmish’s structure remains deeply unrewarding. This is due to two factors: small engagements, and the presence of respawns. I’m sure we’ve all noticed that the leaderboards on our skirmishes often look like this:
The values are almost always skewed, with one or two “carries” tearing up the enemy on each side, and a set of bystanders. How is this related to skirmish’s structure? Firstly, in such small confrontations, differences in skill have a disproportionate effect on outcomes. One bad or uncooperative teammate constitutes a loss of 15% of your fighting strength. Conversely, one comparatively good teammate means 15% of your team is “elite.” Not only that, the death of another team’s carry has little consequences for that team, because they have the potential to respawn (sometimes 3 times in a round). This means that one good player can (and often does) stomp the other team, and one bad player can cost a round through their ineptitude. The system exaggerates skill differentials, and that makes for consistently imbalanced matches.
How then does battle mitigate these issues? Firstly, the fights are far larger, and so skill differentials even out and become less significant. Having a bad regiment or clan assigned to your side in a battle wasn’t a death sentence, even if they made up 20% of your team. There’s a lot of structural reasons for this, one is that larger battles allow new players to pick and choose their fights. They can follow large blobs (a form of teamwork which is unlikely to be achievable in skirmish), and they have the option to blend into a crowd, rather than be forced into suicidal 1v1's. Moreover, losing 50% of your team in a battle simply doesn’t hurt as much as it does in skirmish. Whereas a 3v6 can be brutal (and is inevitable in skirmish once such losses are achieved), players in battle can still have a large group with which to fight, and a 10v20 is far easier to win than, say, a 2v4. This is why carries were far harder to find in battle.
While we’re on the topic of carries, here’s my second reason for why battle is better: deaths matter. If I were to get a lucky kill on say, Beeflip, a player who terrifies me, then he’s gone for this round. There’s a sense of accomplishment associated with this, and it has a tangible (if small) effect on the battle. The chance of him tearing me up is gone, and I can continue to fight without fearing that he’ll reappear this round and smack me. As someone who played Warband battles extensively, and was very bad, this was what kept me going. I had a chance to win; my victories, however small, felt consequential. Furthermore, I got a chance to immerse myself in a competitive, hard fought situation, but I wasn’t ever responsible for winning or losing it. In other words, the wins felt sweeter, and the losses were less bitter. I don’t envy the pubs who get a lucky kill on an OG player, only to have him respawn and “nothing personnel, kid” them. And I'm sorry for those players who feel personally responsible for losing to a VK 6 stack, solely because they were the 15% of the team who couldn’t get a kill. These things didn’t happen in battle, and they allowed the players who weren’t good but wanted to experience a competitive and cutthroat fight to do so.
If Taleworlds really wants to cater to new and casual players, they need to understand that casual refers to the extent to which they play the game, not the kind of fights that they want. Deathmatch and siege are all well and good, but there are pubs and newbies who clearly crave a hard-fought win, rather than a moshpit of sword swings. If you want evidence of this, look at the absolute masochists still playing skirmish. To them, “casual” means that they don’t want to waste their lives mashing rmb to block, not that they hate a challenge in a video game. So please, TW, recognize that there are new and low skill members of our community who want to play something “hardcore,” and that skirmish is inherently hostile to them. Implementing a battle mode would be the best move towards properly including our new players in the fun that the sweaty side of Bannerlord can be, and so I hope you consider it
Signed,
former_casual_player_28
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. JUST TOSS EVERYONE INTO THAT MAP WITH 1 LIFE PLS. DICE PLEASE.
