If you get the same k/d ratio with all of those builds I would suggest you play naked, seems like there's no difference between heavily armored and not armored for you? O.o
*facepalm*
I suggest you try to make some honest statistics...
Wearing heavy armor doesn't give any particular advantage on the field. The high armor value is contered by the terrible lack of speed.Punishing plate users (their "style") by having ridiculous prices for even low tier plate armors was the worst move ever. I think michael doesn't lie when he says he's doing roughly the same k/d with all these classes. But that's not really a reason to change the prices for the anime-looking stuff of the first "class". The problem being, bump cavalry is so noobish that most probably anyone doing it will end up with the same k/d. But other classes are much more skill linked, thus you can have roughly the same k/d with a super costly stuff and a super cheap one, if you are skilled enough (and trust me, new_player_FTW isn't really a total noob).
Light armored people seem not willing to recall that prepatch, most people weren't using plate armors, simply because it's not optimal for most builds. In fact it was realistic in the way that heavy charge style cavalry used heavy armors like they did in the middle ages, and footmen had generally lower armor, for better movement and attack speed. Now everyone is forced to use light or (if the rest of their equipment is cheap) medium armor.
It's perfectly logical ninja's and archers don't complain about upkeep, and flame/troll everyone trying to make it fair. I suggest we completly exclude those people who don't know what they are speaking about from this discussion, as all what they are doing is pure lobbying.
But don't read me wrong : there were some big issues post-patch. Like 40's armored HA, Plated helicopters (Recall of PANZERMARINE_Georges ?), snipers of death-comes-from-nowhere... Those were all solved by the retirement redesign and the new xp curve.
But what did upkeep solved ? Absolutly nothing. On top of that it created global issues very complicated to solve without removing upkeep. Now every succesfull noobish-proof (in the sense "even a noob can play it succesfully") build has all it's wpf points in one domain. Melee characters usually don't go over 15 strenght, because plate armors are useless and you can reliably two shot anyone with 5 PS.
Now everyone tries to be as fast as possible because nothing else is important. Except even more lame crushthrough builds. So in average, any archer and even more, thrower will have more strenght than a melee char
.
In the long term, upkeep is decreasing diversity on the battlefield. Just because 1) you can only upkeep the half of the armors you could pre-upkeep 2) there are very few cost-effective armors, and players start to know what these are 3) Melee characters try to go for as much equipment value as they can, thus increasing their armor up to a "limit" depending on their weapon loadout (but the total upkeep value of the weapon sets of the various melee classes are roughly the same). Many players do this, resulting in the vast majority of melee having armors in the same tier. Same thing for horses. Most horses are from tier 2. People that are playing cav over their income (or with little to no armor) use either sarranid or courser. Trolls play in cloth during 3 rounds then use their plate charger and black plate set for one round. That's another retarded effect of upkeep.
