Sword blocking, that slows you down.

In the past, Minecraft had the functionality to block with swords. It had no direct effect in 1.7 (and 1.8).
But it allows a lot of fighting techniques, because blocking with your sword slowed you down. This movement impact is one of the main reasons, why a huge amount of players are still on these two old versions, what is an extremely unfortunate circumstance. All kinds of players should be on the same version and should be able to enjoy all the new features.

So what can you do in order to bring this functionality back without having to give up the new ones?

Well just do the following:

• when the player has no item in his second hand, he should be able to block with his sword
• this type of "blocking" does not prevent him from any damage
• this type of "blocking" does slow him down (in the same way it was in the past)
• blockhitting should be possible (blocking and hitting at the same time - like in 1.7)

We all know, that Minecraft is supposed to be a building and adventure game, but the community playing pvp can not be ignored. Also, bringing this functionality back would not bother any builder or adventurer in any way.

Additionally I would mention that the way knockback is like in the newer versions is another thing that prevents players from switching to newer versions. This could be implemented easily in a server.properties setting.

It would be great if all these players still playing on versions 1.7 and 1.8 could switch to the new versions, because they all want to enjoy the new content in combination with their most loved servers. Sadly, since today it is the job of the community to connect this massive split with plugins which allow you to join to servers running on different versions. This would all be unnecessary if you implement these little changes to the new versions.