Even if they did, it's obviously be a joke.
Jokes can come off completely differently through chat then how they're
intended; this is known as
interpretation.
Quite frankly, I can see how people get annoyed or even insulted when they get one-shot and are simply told to "get good". It's not justified to say something like this is "obviously" a joke, especially not in the given context.
We worked our way up through the year and level just like you.
Nope, not necessarily. I became a graduate back in 2016 and obtained the last graduate spells early 2018. All of this happened before the wilderness update, back when levels didn't exist and yearing up was much easier then it is now. When revelius released, I could use my skills and knowledge of the server in order to quickly obtain better gear: it didn't nearly take as long as it would take someone that started out as a level 1 on the server.
Anyhow, onto the actual suggestion.
I should say that I do not go to classes anymore, let alone dueling classes (because they are not even close to the best way to earn gold on the server rn lol), but I do very much understand the pain of being killed quickly in dueling for the simple reason that I've sucked at it all my life.
How I understand it, the revelius update changed the dueling system so that dueling was mainly for level 80s, while the dueling classes helped lower levels "prepare", or to put it in other words, help players get better from the ground up. In that light, it seems only sensible to let players duel against players from their same year, or, as someone noted previously within this thread, against players from the same year layer (yr 1-3, 4-6, 7-8 or something if memory serves me correctly). Letting low level players duel against graduates will demotivate them and ensure that they will stay away from dueling, rather than draw them towards it, while I believe the latter is what the revelius update intended to achieve.
For those reasons, I fully agree with the notion of banning the "hunger games" dueling style from dueling classes completely. In my opinion, such a notion has nothing to do with the professor who hosts such a class. If they're not allowed to host such a class format, they won't (otherwise, why would they?) and thus the negative experiences for low level players as described in this thread are prevented. I therefore don't really think it does to discuss about the professor in the example, or any professor for that matter, since that's completely irrelevant to the actual notion in this suggestion.
After all, our job is to host fun classes for you guys and if you have concerns we will try our best to cater to the demands!
ily sal