I've normally been talking about how archers can be fairly deadly, and they should be fairly deadly in terms of damage output, but seriously, this running away thing.
Movement for archers should be about getting to good positions and not letting the enemy close to you by being intelligent about how you position yourself, and even more so coordinating with your own infantry/cav to slow down the enemies and/or turn their backs to you if they have shields. What movement for archers is is standing still and shooting (unless you have to dodge enemy archers) and then running like fuck without most footmen being able to catch you.
Archers sure as hell should annihilate a person without a shield running towards them. Two archers with good positioning sure as hell should annihilate almost any single person if they have range. Hell, currently if you surprise a couple of archers the chances are you get one killed at most and then the other two run away or at worst, coordinate the running directions and shoot you from two sides whilst running away making your only option to try to get out of the situation.
It's sad, but archers are the king of classes right now due to their ability to kite so well. Especially on a suitable map (open enough and/or roofs to camp) there's no class I'd rather have on my team than an archer. With a coordinated team of shield users you can at least make archers fairly useless, but the only effective counter is cavalry, since it's almost the only thing able to catch archers. Dunno, some archers I can catch if I change my gear to cloth from the medium armor I normally wear, but not most.
Simply put: if you get to melee range or close to melee range of an archer, they should be forced to melee. Inb4 rage.
But yeah, I doubt the mod is dying or anything really. As long as they keep changing things the playerbase should be pretty ok until a game that is actually "crpg but better" coms out.
