Lets add some common sense in crpg.
There's a lot of whine lately on the EU servers seeing the number of archers increasing and such...
Well today someone talked about "evolution", telling the evolution of warfare is more range. (Well, that kind of make sense, but since weapons in crpg don't and won't "evolve", they will eternaly stay bows and xbows, so that's not the "kind of evolution" we're interested in what follows)
Evolution is the fact that things take a different "shape" or behaviour to adapt their surrounding. So the evolution is tightely related to the environnement you're evolving in. That applies for pretty much everything, animals (us too), social behaviours, living things in general.
We can apply the principle of evolution on the behaviour of people playing crpg :
There was a time when the larger part of the players were two-hander users (including pole), making them easy targets since not protected from ranged weapons > people started making archers/crossbow characters to take advantage of this lack of protection. Nothing could be more logical, that's evolution.
That probably explains in part the fact that the number of horse users has increased as well, archers being easy targets for cavs.
But the tricky thing with evolution is that's there's an infinity of possibilities since the choices of a few will influence the actions of the rest and create a chain-reaction.
So I think It's time to remind people an obvious simple thing : mount&blade has a unique melee system and, I think, has been made with the main idea that the buyers/players will use and enjoy this unique and great melee system. And not act like retarded kids as we can see in crpg.
If you like to melee and you're fed up with ranged players, take a shield and learn to use it. Carrying a shield isn't "my old friendgish" and skill-less, it's a logical way to protect yourself against projectils and permits you to face multiple ennemies. And you'll have plenty occasion to prove yourself or other people you're not a "my old friend" when you meet an axe user and has to show him your manual block skills. A bit of self-condifence pardis, wearing pink doesn't make you gay, using a shield neither!
If you like to go on foot and you're fed up with cavs, take a spear and show dem horses how you can stop dem good.
Maybe then, I say MAYBE, the insane number of archers and cavs will slowly decrease seeing it will suddenly become less easy for them to do their nasty tricks. And the game will find a balance again.
And if your built doesn't allow to use the kind of weapon you need to defend yourself against the class that piss you off the most, that means you made a retarded build like most of the crpg players because, once, a few 1337 players went full 2-handers, full archery or full pole to show everyone how pro they are.
That seems to be a settled thing, taking the worst part of the gameplay in pretty much any multiplayer game and exploiting it for e-penis reasons.
This is a Role Playing Game, there's no standards in what kind of build you should make, hybrid builds/ personnal builds, with more than 3 class are viable options.
Instead of that we witness an escalation of retarded overpowered builds and people whinning and raging at each others over other ubber unbalanced builds.
If you think your build is the best one but you keep raging at the other classes, well you're obviously wrong somewhere, take a step back and watch the painting.
In conclusion, the game will find its balance, not by whinning about which class to nerf/buff/nurf/berf, the only thing that needs a serious buff is the crowd's brain.
Edit :
aw yeah I'm a noble now, you're not allowed to TLDR me.