Illarion.org

heres an idea, First make wooden sparring tools, swords and whatnot. make a skill called SPARRING, this will be legalised training. Everytime you max out your SPARRING skill, you gain 1 letter experience in the real skill on the chart, train slashing with wooden swords? max it out, get a letter.
Second, two parry skills. Light Weapons (needles,scissors, and the like...)) Heavy Weapons (swords, daggers, ect) trying to raise parry by using a needle will only raise the almost useless light weapons. but using swords cuases a higher death percentage....they will cease using needles, and then focus on the legalised training with wodden weps, less dangerous. harder. but effectve non the less. this wont get rid of powergamers, but it might slow them down.

Seems to be a very good idea.

Maybe additionally, the sparring-skill is also influenced by another skill, that determines, how good someone is in sparring. So, you could raise your fighting skills better with a higher experience in making sparring fights.

Greetings!

 Not a bad idea, not a bad one indeed... There is only one thing I have to add to it: The sparring should only allow you to go this far with your skills. It should never allow you to reach mastery in a certain skill, even when training with a master. Perhaps it should be possible to get the skill you are training up only up to, say, 7 letters under the skill level your trainer has.

yes very good emhyr.

How is the server supposed to tell who's the trainer?

hmmm, heres an idea,
Cntrl+t click on person, that would be the trainer or...
the person who attacks first is the trainer.

Normally, the person with the higher skill is the trainer. This can surely be easily checked by the server.

that has crossed my mind...

A FANTASTIC IDEA, you dont necessarily need a trainer as such, but you could buy or make wooden dummies for sword fights or targets for archery, even incorperate a training center on the map where you can pay to learn somehow.

first start with the wepons, the rest MAY come at a later time, depending on the dev team:)

What's with this trainer stuff? Look, you've got people thinking there already is trainers in the game. Trainers would be bad, you would have to find someone to bother and get them to train you. I say, let them do it themselves.

Erdrick, only powergamers would assist powergamers.