If you liked no upkeep why didn't you play and promote Xmas CRPG? Since no one did there's nothing to discuss on that matter, only an extreme minority desired that. Done deal.
Multiplier is the spawn of all evil. You play because you have it or you leave because you lose it. Mix it with Auto team balance being fubar and always splitting you and your friends up. That's two daily reasons for clicking ALT + F4.
Then combine it with being bumped or shot 24/7 these days when playing on anything else but Siege.
Meh.The only thing that I find "fun" these days is playing my archer alt and shooting Cav horses, there's no time to do anything else but shoot Cav because there's so many but at least when succeeding in this venture the team 99.9% wins the round.
If upkeep would be removed we'd just see 20 times as much Cav plus everyone in in general in Plate/Heavy armor. The only reason 'no upkeep' ever worked is because the mod was relatively new, eventually we saw everyone use the highest tiers of gear and that's something which would without a doubt ruin the mod completely if allowed to continue.
What's needed is an idea to replace the Multiplier feature plus actually fixing Auto Team Balance -- making banners absolute but without the possibility to "exploit" it by having multiple clans use the same -- it would with guarantee have more people play the mod overall, otherwise people will continue to trickle away, not just due to these reasons though of course.
Upkeep could be replaced with another idea as well and the developers have sought that in public ages ago, but so far no one ever come up with anything that would actually work.
Fix/Change:- Multiplier
- Auto Team Balance
- ((New idea instead of Upkeep depending on the solution for 1))
- Register Assists
Personally I'd try the old X gold per kill via range, but XP using the multiplier system.