Yes but it also means no punches to the face.
The question is, what are you trying to gain from your sparring or, what are you sparring for? If your main goal is to do point or continuous sparring competition then pad it up. No pads however is also very sketchy at best. Vale tudo for instance is no pads full contact but, again when striking with just the bare fist you sustain more damage to the knuckles and to the wrist and, you really don't do anymore damage to the opponents body in fact you do less. MMA and boxing gloves are designed to protect the strikers hands not your opponents face as opposed to say Macho sparring gear or Century.
Boxing and MMA gloves allows me to hit my opponent much much harder and also spreads the concusive force of the impact over a wider area. If you want to see the physics behind this in action all you need is a fish tank, strike the tank bare knuckle, you'll see a small kind of weak ripple in the water. MMA, 4oz - 5oz glove, or boxing glove, 12oz - 14oz hard leather fight glove, you'll see a much more intense ripple that covers a far large area. This increased concussive damage is what leads to a boxer being punchy.
I despise head gear with face shields for anything but, children or weapon fighting. People with shields become over confident and ignore things like jabs.
At my gym we train for MMA competition and, yes I know that in the street Godzilla can eat you and a bunch of other stuff like polar bear ridding ninjas attack you which totally makes my training methods useless but, just check it out. We train with open palm MMA training gloves which are 7 to 8 ounces. The foam in these is an open cell air forced foam which makes it slightly softer then closed cell foams which are used in regular MMA gloves. Meaning less damage from impact. You can wear head gear if you want, most don't. This allows us to train for everything in an MMA fight at about 70 to 80 percent contact which includes ground and pound. Yes their are still some bloody noses and black eyes but no broken bones really and most importantly you don't really get rocked. You can get a quality pair of MMA training gloves from Top Contender for about $30, Combat Sports makes a good pair for $50 and Fairtex also makes a pair for around $70. I like the Top Contender one it's cheap and holds up pretty well.
Cheers and good luck training.
