I'm pretty sure there's plenty of ppl who prefer new kicks to old ones. Dunno how someone can say that old kicks were fine, there was basically no risk in doing them. Maybe new kicks aren't perfect but according to me they're much better than the old ones (and I never do kicks, but now I can try to punish guys who spam kicks). Personal dislike isn't the same as objective crapiness So, um, what else is broken according to you if I may ask?
The kick is broken when you can be off to the side 2 or 3 feet in either direction of the leg/foot and still get kicked. That's the definition of broken. Since when do items have area of effect in crpg or warband? I'd rather go back to the "no risk" kick we used to have, than have a whirlwind tornado coming out of someone's leg that can knock back 5-10 people at a time if they are grouped up in a 5 foot wide proximity.
I'd say the 2h stab was a problem, and instead of fixing the 2h stab animation (or active properties of the stab) they decided to basically do the same thing to polearms and 1h stabs.
The team balance system has been borked for a couple years as well.
Overall I think the game is in a great state, but it's common sense that if you're not going to be around for a couple months, you probably shouldn't release any large game mechanic changes. Strategus on the other hand has been problematic since it's inception of strat 4. I won't even try to list all the problems except the largest one, duplicate item bug where after a battle where armor was around the 1500 mark, people end up winning the battle and have 150,000 of each armor piece, and 10 times the amount of weapons they started with. I grind months moving my guy across the map trading, but one dupe bug and I'd be able to nullify all the months of hard work. They have improved some aspects of strat since version 4 started, but overall there's a lot that could be done to improve it.
One other strat bug that's been a problem since the start of strat 4...if you have more than 10k crates it shows up at 0 crates on the map. You'd think that would be a really quick and easy fix. Strat is different than crpg, but my point is pretty similar. If you're not going to be around to fix things that are broken, I'd rather not have new game mechanics introduced that may or may not be working as intended.