Strongly disagree. I have no problems with banditry, but honestly it's akin to tavern RP in that 99% of it is just completely irrelevant and will never lead to anything of note for either party. War, on the other hand, massively moves the story along and affects everyone and their characters. And that's what the server's about in my opinion, co-operative story-telling. The idea that you could have your own impact, however big or small, on this dynamic ever-changing world and be a part of its history.
And like I mean, yeah, you can play your part in a tea time conversation or by slitting some random peasant's throat in the middle of nowhere, that has some small impact on the world too, but the big changes are always affected by the actors in the theatre of war. War has always been the main thing that shook things up and ended periods of staleness and stagnancy. No matter how much people keep spamming tourneys and feasts every two minutes, it'll never be a replacement for the true kind of drama that only real conflict with actual stakes can cause.
Sure, people always got pissed and some people would always leave after they lost a war. But the vast majority of the time the people that left over wars returned a couple weeks later after cooling off. If they all left for good every time, there would be literally no humans left after all the civil wars and **** we've had. And sometimes a playerbase being smashed is even a good thing IMO. Those players, when they return, are forced to join new groups and interact with people they might've been in completely opposing or unrelated playerbases to before the war. That kind of thing is better than people being in the same immortal cliques for 6 years straight.