Essential and Critical changes to Combat System

[Piscator]

Well, anything that keeps you from moving, attacking and moving back makes drag-combat less effective. You might be locked up and possibly doomed, but another person couldn't just kill you anymore without a realistic chance of getting hurt.

About surprise attacks: I think it would be a good idea to prohibit certain actions while being challenged. This would include eating healing food or making battle preparations of any kind (changing armor if ever implemented, taking stimulating drugs etc.). In the suggested system the defender is slightly advantaged and this could help to balance it out. If you declared an attack on an unsuspecting victim, this victim would be "surprised" and thus unable to prepare for battle (for which the options are admittedly pretty limited right now). This would also mean that the three guys from the example would be able to kill their victim in most cases (who would be able to heal himself only after answering all three challenges), but at least there would be plenty of time to RP a heroic death.

[Polt86]

There are exploits in any system and any reform you make will simply be exploited once again.

A little off topic, but Cantr could always go the XBox Live route and suspend/ban players who continuously knowingly use exploits.

I would be totally against it, but the option exists.

Back on topic:

Anything that brings the time frame of combat to that of the rest of the game would be a positive change.