2. Class balance seems to be changed a lot. I saw that xbowmen population got reduced (maybe 2-3 per 30 man team), there were actually more horse xbomen than foot. I guess it's somehow connected to the str requirements being changed. The amount of archers is the same. The amount of throwers just went to double or even tripple (equal to the amount of archers), the amount of horse ranged got reduced a little bit, longspear/pike users simply disappeared.
2-3 crossbows per 30 man team is enough. So an improvement.
Horse crossbows vary, sometimes you have a couple, sometimes you have none. (Strength requirements for them have changed too)
The recent patch buffed throwers, of course everybody and their mothers are playing thrower now. Wait a week or two and it will be down to normal.
Longspears and pikes are still there, you just played at the wrong time.
3. Throwers. It looked to me that throwers became an uber class that has no counters on the battle server. Buff of melee mode of throwing weapons was a completely wrong idea in my opinion. Also they seem to be very accurate (much more than they should be). The one who suggested such changes made a mistake, thumbs down for that.
Get a shield, or stay away from ranged. If you have a shield you can easily engage a thrower in melee, and if you are better you win. If you have no shield you can't complain about ranged impaling you left right centre.
Throwing accurately requires some proficiency points, thus reducing the proficiency of your melee class. If someone has both awesome melee and throwing proficiency they can't have a lot of power throw.
Throwing buff was desperately needed. It was the most useless class (apart from ridiculous hybrids/tribrids etc)
4. All polearms stopping horses. I've read somewhere that you can't rear a horse with a glance anymore but all polearms now can rear with a thrust. To sum up: I didn't like it, even a peasant can rear an armored horse now. The idea might have been good but the realisation is horrible. Very creepy with bardich kind weapons. Also bump damage is kinda strange.
As Macropus said, the polearm needs a pierce stab, which excludes quite a few polearms already.
Also as Marcopus said, peasants could always rear horses, check the polearm lengths of peasant weapons.
Cavarly is very strong as it is, they can easily one-hit-kill you. So a few more weapons to stop their horses are a useful addition.
5. Onehanded animation. Seems like thrust didn't get fixed and it is still very easy to land pointblank lolstabs. In addition to the new right swing animation I would say that it was better than it is now. If it was tweaked it would be much better than before though, but nobody did it with thrust at least.
Thrust is very predictable, every decent 1h player stabs at least half of their attacks. Downblock is the new shield.
The new animation looks a bit clunky, Tydeus said he will look into it. The new animation helps though. Automatically easier to hit the head, whereas before you had to look up into the sky to hit the enemies head. And it glances less often.
6. Flags with 5 people left. Overall a terrific idea. Especially annoying when you only have 10 players in your team and flags appear almost instantly. Also they spawn in bad places. Also sometimes they spawn right after the round start. Sometimes they don't finish the round at all. Sometimes you can see indicators of flags under the ground so you know where they will spawn. Very glitchy mechanic that kills diversity. When in the past I could win a round alone versus multiple enemies now it doesn't seem to be possible because they will just cap the flag that is in the other part of the map and that's it. Also a lot of people just ignore these flags and so on. I don't even understand why this mechanic got added (horse ranged?). Very bad idea, horrible realisation. Thumbs down.
The issues with flags need to be fixed, yes. But I guess those flags have saved many of us many minutes, or by now probably many hours of sitting and waiting until a delaying idiot gets killed. Overall a good addition, just needs a bit of tweaking.
8. Bad map rotation, newly added maps are mostly bad. It would be much better if maps were set according to server population.
Some maps are good, some are bad. Personal preference really. Setting maps regarding map size according to server population would be good though.
9. Weather and day/night time still didn't get fix. Played 3 maps with rain in a row.
Adjust your brightness or just tweak your configs to see everything clear as day. Constant rain does suck though.
10. Population got dropped to ~50%. Good indicator that things don't go well. cRPG has no rivals so it only indicates that people quit the game, not just move to a better mod/game.
People get bored, get a new job, their computer breaks or whatever. It is normal that a game loses players over time. Some are not happy with a certain patch and thus leave, others are happy and return.
cRPG does not have real rivals, apart from WotR and Chivalry maybe, even though they play differently (and in my personal opinion are far worse)
But people do play other games too. Dark Souls 2 was released a few days ago. Half of my steam contact list is filled with Dark Souls 2 players now, who previously played cRPG every day.
Once new games get a bit boring people will eventually return to cRPG. It is the cycle of terrific games, they lose population after a while, but eventually people return.
I didn't try xbows/archery, because I think they're all the same. Overall I can't say that mod became better. One frustrating thing got replaced by another. Game balancing team seems to do strange decisions. I don't want to sound negative but I didn't like the game that I played. There are still a lot of weapons that are just obviously OP and people tend to abuse them.
I uninstalled the game in the same night as servers simply became empty.
I recently went to Florida after I haven't been there for a year. The skies were grey and it was raining. So I grabbed the next flight back home. Overall I think it became a very grey and rainy country and I now really dislike it.
What the fuck? If everybody judged based on obersations of one day, or not even one whole day in your case, you would probably still hunt animals using a spear, and in your free time you would bash two stones against each other.
Everything in your memory seems brighter and happier and more interesting than it actually was. Remember that one game you played back in 1998? It looked amazing didn't it? And hey! It even got a graphics update so it must look even better now! But nope, even with an improvement made it looks absolutely shit.
That works with everything, maybe you just remember cRPG being better than it really was.
EDIT:
TL;DRWhat a load of shit.
