Archery is skilless in Native, but native has no faiting and other stuff that makes ppl mad and thats why its more balanced. There is no 35 lvl 2h agi builds that own anything on battlefield. Everybody is even and it only depends on its playstyle how good he is. crpg now is just 2handers, fainting and throwers, all on agi builds. Even ppl that used play crpg for nearly 2k hours said that on forums that native is more accessable than crpg. If its not ballance than what makes this that warband is still overpopulated and crpg not?
cRPG has never had a comparable supporting population to Warband with way, way fewer unique players. Server populations were quite high, but that is because most cRPG players played a lot and did so for a very long time. A side effect of this is that the average player skill has consistently risen and risen fast, making the game less accessible even though the grind got more and more accessible. From the start of 2013 and onwards this mod got hard to enjoy to anyone that isn't a hardcore gamer or a quick learner.
If you play on many of the big population Native servers, you'll quickly notice that the amount of people that does not suck is much lower than on cRPG. Many servers are still at the average 2011 cRPG level. Even new players have fun on those servers though and can get kills. Some Native servers have very high skill, like IG_Battlegrounds, some of the shit that gets pulled there would make a noob very mad. The point is though that they don't have to play there, and they don't. In cRPG the NeoGK_Siege players and the IG_Battlegrounds players have to play together and this has made the mod extremely unattractive for new players for at least the past two years. Yet, the population stayed high, but they were largely the same players throughout 2012-2014. Gradually the mod has become boring for most of the skilled oldmy old friends that have often been playing for 3 years straight, but they have already scared away most of the newmy old friends, leaving the mod without a population.
I agree with the argument that the grind has worsened these problems, but as the grind has been steadily reduced since 2010 while the population has steadily decreased, that in itself can't be the whole story.
