i only started playing a week ago and this new patch is in MY opinion pretty poor, its turned it into what you wanted to get away from the upkeep system is just not worth it, i have Byrnie(4k body armour), mailboots (3k foot armour), kettle helm (2k head armour) a board sheild(2k sheild) and a iron war axe(4k weapon) this is not top tier items in anyway yet in just 3 maps i had 20k less then what i started with i had an item break nearly every round and every other round it would break 2 or 3 things to make up for the times it didn't, so the only way i can keep playing with any equip is to either let it break and make it worthless or just leech naked so i can build up some cash to have a couple of games with items, its overkill atleast with the old system yeah you didn't gain much if you lost but you didn't lose everything.
In my eyes the patch only needed to:
* Put in the lvl cap and no wpf bouns from retirement ,that would make people have to choose between the best armour and and being fast with weapons maybe make armour reduce wpf a little more if it wasn't working that way.
*Make it so heavier armour slowed down horses, that would open up to faster cav taking down tank cav or choosing between own armour or horse armour.
* Limited arrows to 1 quiver, would make them take there time with shots not spam and choose between few good arrows or more crappy ones, though there were only a few archers that could get to the top of the scoreboard a sheild pretty much negated an archers effect.
*The old xp/gold system should of stayed it forced people to get close to the action, the xp rate from a match isn't much faster then what you'd get on a 120 cap server if you survived to near the end anyway could of done that by just removing the dying stopping you getting xp part or up the amount of time you still got xp for.
*Make sheilds effect on some shields to stop the tiny sheilds being able to stop shots(both melee and ranged) at the feet or head.
Hope people take away constructive critisim from this post and not just a whine, the great thing i liked about cRpg was the persistant character you got to create as it stands right now i have 2 persistant characters a naked leecher and the character i want to be.
Just on a note to the mod creators, I know this is a mod and FREE which i'm very thankful for, ofcourse its upto you and you're team on what the mod is and isn't my post is purely my own opinion and feedback which you can take anything or nothing from. Again thanks for the mod its great what you do for free.