People expect different things from the game. Some just want a realistic medieval battle, some only care about melee combat, others want all classes to be balanced. What i love most about this game and what kept me around so long is the awesome melee combat. Best i have seen in a game yet, ranged combat is quite simple and has been done before in several games, so it's really not that appealing to me.
For me ranged is quite frustrating, and it's not because i can't handle it. I have a lot of experience playing this game and played most of my time as a shielder. Unless im seriously outnumbered i usually don't get hit by ranged just by positioning myself correctly and using my shield. However I can also never even attack a archer myself, they can always outrun me, unless i just make some agy char and sacrifice my armor to catch them.
What some people might feel about ranged is that when you fight a melee player, or even cav no matter the situation it feels like your skill actually matters and you always have a chance to actually fight them. Even if you are outnumbered you still have a chance to fight back. However ranged classes can just attack and do damage to you (even if it's just your shield) without risking taking any dmg themselves and giving you a chance to fight them back, no matter how good you might be. When a pure melee player manages to attack an archer it is only because they made an error.
Obviously it might make it in a way feel more like an actual battle and force you to use teamwork to beat different enemy classes but really even historically archers were used to soften up enemy ranks and were not skilled enough to headshot someone while hes fighting 4 enemies, run away and repeat doing it, but i don't like to use any realism discussion for game balancing. Ofcourse this is just how ranged combat works and imo they are not OP in any way compared to melee or cav, i guess i just personally dislike ranged in this game, but this is just what i enjoy about this game and it may be completely different for other people.
Anyway after typing all this nonsense really the only thing i see to make the situation better is to make archers a lot slower like has been previously suggested, so most melee people can catch up to them. In that case archers would somewhat actually have to rely on their teammates aswell to survive. Since they would not be able to outrun half the enemy team alone they might have to stick closer to their teammates and think more about their positioning on the battlefield since they would not be able to flank from million sides and outrun any danger they encounter. This would but them bit more into a support class role aswell. You also would get slight chance of winning a 1v2 situation vs ranged as infantry.
For me though, i would be able to handle all that ranged spam but the game is just starting to get boring like will almost any if you play it for too long. It has mainly been the same old thing for almost 2 years now. Only thing that can really make me stick to a game for a long, long amount of time is large MP competetive scene which always gives you fun challenges. That is why i have sticked so long to games like Starcraft, counter strike 1.6 even though i like them less then warband. Im secretly hoping that they focus more on Multiplayer with M&B 2 and we can get something like that there.
/// Edit: Damn this turned out to be a long post:O writing it went so fast, probably repeated myself 10 times there, gonna read it over later when i have some time.
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