Currently on my phone and don't want to bother with formatting so sorry in advance.
I want to bring up how there is not much rewarding incentives in the game for actually playing it. There are a lot of competitive aspects to this game that would feel so much more fun/rewarding/satisfying to players if they actually did have incentives to them. I have a suggested idea, not very original however, that could work for solo sparring in the least. What if for regular sparring there was no longer a simple win/loss tracker, and instead just a point system?
It would range from 0 to 1500 and be split into 5 categories from bronze to silver, gold, platinum, and diamond. Essentially how it works is wins give points, losses take points away AND when you beat someone from a higher rank you gain more points and lose less. Vice Versa for playing against someone lower, which would also give incentive to play against those at your own skill level or better. Then, at the end of each season 4 times a year you are rewarded specifically for the rank that you achieved by the end of it, and then your rank is reset to 0 and you start again.
This gives incentive to ALL players to actually participate and PLAY the GAME as well as keeping them actively playing due to reset ranks AND discourages taking advantage of worse players than yourself.
Any thoughts?