A controversial suggestion

[ratqueen]

Get rid of restrained fights.

incredibly true and brave to say

as it stands some people are sparring as a full time job. delete restrained fights and there's a good chance that they'll instead be interacting with other characters in meaningful ways. even if they just afk in the plaza instead, you won't have newer players coming in feeling like they also have to spar 300 times before they can compete with the chronic sparrers. see:

Going to have to hard disagree with this one, it took me well over 300 spars before I started winning anything.

if you stop people from being able to crunch the numbers on every single skill and from being able to practice them all ad nauseum with effort equal to the pursuit of a PhD, they won't be as ahead of the curve come the next balance update, and the next, and the next, so on and so forth.

instead of forcing new players to invest unreasonable amounts of time into "catching up" to spar addicts (thereby instilling the PvP mentality into every new player who walks in the door), just delete restrained fights and watch the current hyperawareness of the meta fade away a little, evening the playing field that way so everyone can focus on just roleplaying.