Except it's not. Different classes offer different gear options and they should ultimately lead to a balanced game (in a somewhat perfect scenario - i.e. balanced classes and factions). If every class can pick up any gear and have the same proficiency, where's the balance you talk about? If a 60 armour inf with full health picks up a crossbow/bow, how is that balanced compared to the enemy archers without shield and with ~30 armor, where's the balance when someone can literally setup a 4-5 archers setup just by picking up bows late into the round? Where's the balance when you can take a stray horse and ultimately become a class worth 50 more gold than yours? All this would be a bit less impactful in a single-life gamemode, but it would still somewhat affect the gameplay and would get abused extremely, this you can bet on.
With your design in practice, we would see infantry picking up bows and horses way too much, instantly becoming 2 classes. We would see teams abusing horse archers. There's a reason for having different proficiencies or for blocking certain classes to pick up certain weapons. Hell, all it took in Warband was a simple long awlpike drop for cavalry to get double the damage output, this would just be extremely abusable.
Yes, archers should have less armor than cav or inf, I agree. Compensating with a little lower bow skill I would be okay with. If armor is not a perk but instead a class, I can’t imagine a situation where one wouldn’t try to get a better weapon. With one life, and even equal armor values across all three classes, I really can’t see how swapping equipment could be abusable.
I think as people get better at the game spending the time to pick up items except in the case of replacement arrows, missiles, shields, will not be an optimal decision so the matter is honestly trivial.
Again, I sincerely believe neutering the gameplay to stop someone abusing the third spawn option by picking cheap options is the absolute wrong way to balance. Ideally there would be only one life. That should be the biggest complaint about skirmish imho.
Eco cheese is also a trivial matter. If a heavy lancer and heavy horse archer or light lancer or horse archer cost the same, there’s no reason to cheese the equipment.
Tbh all factions should have equal options so that vlandian players wouldn’t have to think of a creative way to counter khuzait horse archers with by taking the crossbow from the sharpshooter and giving it to the cav. These actions are not abuse, it’s the players trying to get around the poor faction balance. Ultimately I agree with all of you. There is a balance issue and tw needs to address it because the game is breaking.
A little off topic but I think something like scriptkiddie packeting an opponent’s ip or ddosing a server is abuse and should result in a vacban and a global ban ingame and in tournaments. This should be enforced by the community. Cheating destroys the game and community. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.
Picking up items? Not so much.
Anyways. I hope the next update comes in soon and makes all of us happy. Best of luck and peace!