Cracked items

I've been browsing the forums for 3-4 days and noone seems to have pointed this out:
how can CRACKED items stand more than a few blows?
1) Steel in the middle ages was full of impurities and quite high in carbon content, which means brittle! If there was a crack, it would propagate to failure in no time...
2) Would you be able to draw a 50 pounds cracked bow without busting it? The crack would propagate (it's, in fact, auto-accelerating) as soon as you reach its stress limit, and even if the bow miraculously survived one shot, there IS a phenomenon called "fatigue"

What do you think?

Well, it would be realistic sure enough. But then again, any weapon can crack and break. The easiest solution keeping with both realism and fun, would be to give every piece of equipment a durability rating. Cracked items would simply have a much lower durability, and or could degrade much more rapidly. But this idea has been suggested many times, but i like it.

Well, of course playability is all-important... I was just stating that "cracked" doesn't appeal to me as a weapon prefix... I mean, bent, yes, rusty, all the way, battered, hell yeah, but cracked? I'd better like "poor", "crappy", "mass-produced", "EA-style"...

I didn't like Everquest when all of my equipment was rusty, I mean come on my dude may not be a smith but doesn't he know how to polish a rusty sword? His life may depend on that rusty sword. Rusty equipment is just some guy who doesn't care anymore.

Yes, EA-style arming sword sounds fine to me. The quality should be even worse than cracked though.