RP fighting

So, I had built a large air arena, with the idea of (once I figured out wether I'd get more land or not) having combative matches, melee, gunfights, and once I could find a decent set up for it, old school boxing.
metered and non metered stuff.
  but Miss Netizen beat me to it, at least in part, with opening cuffs, mostly focused on hand to hand, or puglism, and apparantly either RP'd or metered.  So I'm probably going to hold off on my sky arena for now,  as it was pretty much to fill in the same purpose.  I might rework it as a shooting range, but usually when I leave out a zombie rezzer, people get to shoot, and there's been a couple gunfights off and on in my land apparantly (it's why I have damage on afterall, to encourage fighting)

One of the things I could never really understand, is the beleif that having some sort of combat, especially if it's metered, somehow will magically turn any sim into 'just another combat sim'
I guess in Babbage's case, it goes hand in hand with their wierd bi-polar relationship with RP (they're getting much better about it though).   but in general, I can say, I've been in and RP'd in many sims that do have meters and combat, and it's never really taken away from the RP, or shopping, if that's your preference.  If anything, meters for combat would even help, you get less arguing over who shot who, and wether they can have matrix like abilities to dodge every bullet (an RP awhile back got so bogged down by that argument, it just sucked), meters, there's no argument, you're down, you're down. it doesn't mean you're dead, most sims using meters don't do the perma-death unless it's consenual, IE: you're sick of that character, want to be someone else, usually, you lose at meter, you RP recovering a bit from an injury is all (or rp being a captive, as seems to be common in another genre of SL RP Gizzy's told me about).  Worried about shopaholics getting hit by stray bullets? don't be, metered weapons likely wouldn't effect them at all, and most sims that use them have a rule anyway, don't shoot in stores (much like common sense would say in RL)

Some of them even keep their meter's optional, Insilico uses DCS2 (they're currently working on their own, simpler and less laggy meter last I knew), and it's completely optional, most of the people there only put them on when they expect a big fight or battle.   Ravenscraig has their RPS meter (as much as I find flaws in it, t's nice that it also has non-combat skills), Legends of Cybertron, before the sim owner got bored with SL and left, used the terra combat meter.  and none of these sims really turned into combat sims, with the exception of Ravenscraig, cmbat actually just happens on occasion, with alot of non-combative RP going on inbetween.

So, far as I can see, the whole idea of 'but meter combat will turn any sim into a combat sim!' is false, it's like anything else, you put in guidelines, no shooting up the stores, in more RP focused sims, any combat needs a decent RP reason, no just walking up and hitting someone out of the blue, etc.  and it can actually be pretty good.