So, I know it's frustrating for some people to end up in lockdown matches against substantially better-geared opponents--people who have spent hundreds of dollars worth of CE on getting the best UVs and the best Trinkets and whatnot. Now, this is a legitimate complaint to an extent, but as another poster ightly pointed out in another thread on the topic, it wouldn't really be fair or desirable to just take an easy solution and disable all trinkets and UVs in lockdown--people spending CE on top-end lockdown gear is good for OOO, and let's face it--to some extent, that effort deserves reward.

A long time ago, I played a free-to-play game called Gunbound, which was purely PVP and, as it grew, began to run into a similar problem. You could acquire gear with rewards that you get for free just by playing, but it took a very, very long time--time that people would often circumvent by purchasing the gear with cash. That's fine--it's good for everyone that you can purchase gear with cash, but it got to the point where the very good gear would dominate games, and it was frustrating for more casual players--players who didn't have the time or money to put into getting the good gear.

To resolve this issue, they made a couple of servers where you could play with the gear stats turned off (to make it clear, gear in this game was the rough equivalent of UVs in spiral knights--it didn't dictate your essential offensive and defensive abilities, it just gave you some buffs to those abilities). They had a ranking system, and playing on the "casual" servers didn't affect your rank (so the competitive players didn't bother except for practice) and players who were particularly competitive still had plenty of places to play with their gear against other people with their gear and increase their rank and generally, you know, compete with each other--while players who didn't care that much and didn't want to get wrecked over and over again by people who had put way more time or money into good gear could play against each other elsewhere.

This could be a very simple toggle: toggle whether you want to play in the competitive league or the casual league. In the competitive league, everything goes--your stats get tracked and you get ranked and you get to brag about how awesome you are. In the casual league, you just get your basic gear--two weapons, no UVs, no trinkets, and you play for kicks or to kill time without worrying about rankings.

Anyway, if I were running this game, that's how I'd set it up. I don't see a downside, and I see substantial upsides, at least in terms of overall player happiness.