I can take a stab at this.
First example: It wasn't a D&D game, but it was my first GURPS game. Having mostly played D&D at this point, I had tried my best to make a simple melee Fighter-esque character. I'm used to ranged weapons only being occasionally effective in D&D (2e) so I didn't bother to give myself the skill for using a bow or crossbow; my experience had been that encounters start, and quickly everyone proceeds into melee.
So we're traveling in bandit country, and the GM says we see riders approaching in the distance; with a great roll, someone notices they are wearing the bandit clan's colors. I announce I'll start moving towards the riders, while everyone else busts out their ranged weapons.
The encounter was over before the riders could retreat, take cover, or I ever got anywhere near melee range.
I learned from this that allowing encounters to start at extreme range can lead to very lopsided battles.
Example 2: during the 3e era, my group naturally used a big Chessex battlemap. We would start encounters at the map's edge a lot, and it wasn't long before someone noticed that their bow range was well off the map, and started griping that it was strange that even outdoor encounters always started at this particular range category.
After a good conversation about how extremely long range combat was really problematic (imagine an encounter where you're ambushed by a bunch of bowmen standing just beyond the treeline with no available cover) the player relented, but asked the simple question of "why does my bow have super long range like that if the game can't handle it?".
Example three: once in a Pathfinder game, I helped my roommate build an archer Fighter. Everything he did went into ranged combat. This did lead to a few troublesome fights for him, but more often than not, he more than kept up with the melee Fighters. At around level 6, we were exploring this ruined city, and we spotted enemies at a distance.
While everyone else is closing, he's immediately raining down four attacks (BAB, Rapid Shot, Manyshot) at enemies, actually killing one before they could even take cover. Cue GM immediately grouching about how ridiculously broken ranged combat is.
"So basically, any encounter I run, I have to make sure the guy with a bow doesn't murder everything before the melee can do anything? Like every fight has to have cover, wind, concealment, and anti-ranged magic?"
I sympathized, of course, but in the end, the only answer I had was, "pretty much, yes". It's one of those things that's very true to life; ranged combat is very good if you don't have a counter for it, but it's not necessarily fun for a game to realize that outside of tiny rooms and cramped dungeon corridors, a party of four bow users could obliterate most encounters in short order.
