Here is my two cents on this discussion. If you are actively hunting for people to kill, you generally have the advantage, whether you are the village applicant or the lowbie mage hunting. If you let the lowbie mage or the village applicant initiate the fight, you are in trouble, because they will have prepared for you and you will not be prepared for them.

If you don't want to be the hunted, be the hunter. I recognize that the detect invisible issue does exist, but the vast majority of lowbie mages don't hunt villager applicants or anybody for that matter, nor do they hang out invisible for the most part. So get out and hunt.

Part of the reason I rolled Palmer was that grouping and levelling uninterrupted was starting to feel like an entitlement to some of the playerbase. When I first started, you would bring a lowbie mage in your group with two warriors just so he would have detect invisible up and be watching for people coming to destroy the group. That had changed when Palmer was there and I wanted the newbies of that age to realize that someone jumping a ranking group was something you always had to be concerned about.