Still it provided more of an incentive to use tactics and such then now, people needed to stick together, something which is missing now. Cavalry was less spawnraping and all over the place. It kept things focused, it also made roofcamping less of a thing. Mostly there was one roof that both teams fought over. Not several filled with archers.
There's more team-play involved in mobbing than there is with the current way crpg is played. Not to mention, mobbing still wins the rounds, might as well have an incentive for it. This, in my opinion, is kind of underrated or misunderstood in this discussion. Lots of people seem to be under the impression that the multi system allowed for more "teamwork". The only thing I see it helping is flankers, and even then, AGI flanking is currently suicide.
A game rewarding the hardcore grinders and pummeling the casual players into the dirt. No skill based gameplay just spam your weapon in plate as fast as you can with your over the top wpf 24/24 lolbuilds.
That doesn't sound too different from where we're currently at. Now a days damn near every melee guy has loomed gloves and heavy/plate armor. At least back then looms weren't as common place. As far as "skill" goes, the current melee speed removes a lot of the skill requirement from battle servers.
C-RPG's current speed doesn't even match that of a native medium speed server. So much for your "skill based gameplay".
1. Level cap doesn't allow diversity. I think that at least 70% of builds are 18/21 or 21/18, twohanders, polearmers, archers and cavalry, only crossbowmen and shielders go 15/24 or 18/18. This is boring. I think that soft cap should be moved to level 32, so that some people could have those OP, but very funny builds.
Indeed we have a lack of diversity right now, but I'm not ready to say it's because of the level cap. I think it's more or less that it is much more difficult to hybrid effectively than it was back in those days. Though I will admit that raising the level cap just a few levels would most likely allow people to get a fair amount of extra skill points which would
probably add to the diversity.
A mix of what we got now and what we had would ve been perfect....
This seems to be the general consensus. I think it was shik who put it best when he said "Crpg has lost its intensity".
We've had a lot of great improvements since then, mostly thanks to WSE I think. These improvements might allow for old game mechanics to be better implemented.