Since some over zealous moderator locked the 'The Final Solution to the Archer Issue' i might as-well post my reply on this thread, since its not entirely off-topic.
Archers say they only have 32 (bodkin) arrows and thus are unable to kill as many as they wish to. What they seem to forget is that there are tons of other archers out there with the same amount of arrows.
To be kind, lets say out of 100 people on the battle server, 20 people are playing as archers. Thats 10 archers per team.
If every archer fire all his arrows (based on bodkin) thats 640 arrows.. Most archer probably wont fire them all, depending on map & luck.
So lets say 75% of the arrows gets fired. Thats 480 arrows per round...
If we add in the xbows & throwing projectiles, it is no wonder people hate range.
It takes more than one arrow to kill someone though.
I'm lvl 31 with 144 prof and I use a warbow and it still takes 2+ arrows to kill anyone in decent armor or someone with str/ironflesh high enough to matter.
The only complaint I've had with archery the entire time I've played crpg (way back to pre-retirement days) is that it's meant to be a support class and with this mod it's impossible to be a support character. You get nothing out of it. Not even a useless little number on the website to boost your ego. I can look and see how many people I've killed, but I get nothing for shooting someone 3 times and having a teammate who happened to be closer to the guy walk over and overhead him and get a kill that should have been mine.
But that's how archery should be. Anything else would just break the mod even more.
Throwing IMO is a bit op, but eh, nothing you can't rage about for a bit and move on about.
Back to the OP's point:
The game does feel different; I think that the whole retirement thing was crazy but I'm not the one developing the game so meh.
I completely agree that the 'original' crpg was the best time I've had in this game. I was a shitty low-level archer that was lucky to get more than 5 kills a map but somehow it was still loads of fun.
The new goal of the game has become to level your character, retire, and tripple loom every item you use.
Which is a grind, right? Yes.
Whether the goal of retirement was to create this new kind of grind or not is pointless. Ya I could retire and heirloom something but if I were retiring to change my build it would be useless to loom a 2h weapon and switch to pole and at the same time, I don't want to retire at 15 and get no bonus.
I just hate everything since the introduction of retirement so I'm a bit biased, haha.
Actually retirement is why I quit cRPG for a month or so. Once I decided that I needed to look at it as a new game, rather than an updated version of cRPG it was ok.
I honestly wish that they would run two server sets, one for the "original" crpg and one for this new chadz rpg thing, whatever it is.
That would solve all my complaints.