Care to elaborate? How is it against lore? and how is it detrimental?

@Matt:

The threat of the Burning Legion is greater than ever; the very fabric of time itself is under attack; Illidan schemes within his black temple, and we go and play a game of gladiators under the watchful gaze of a goblin in a tuxedo for the benefit of the empty stadium. At least with battlegrounds they made a half-hearted attempt to patch up Unreal Tournament with some lore. Arenas are a joke. Having said that, I hear that the new comic book with the King of Stormwind in it involves arena tournaments, so maybe Blizzard is belatedly attempting to make it fit.

Either way, it's still detrimental to the game. When classes and abilities are balanced around very specific 5v5 combos then the whole game suffers, because what balances a lock in a team of pally warrior mage and shaman against an identical team is not necessarily balanced for anything else in the game. We've seen this time and time again, and I really hope that the expansion is going to wipe the slate clean and return PvE to its rightful place at the heart of game design once more. By all means have arenas and tournaments, but don't make the game revolve around them. They are, after all, an addition to the game, not the game itself.

I like how every comment on this blog that even has a hint of PvP support gets modded down. Even a legitimate question 2 comments up lol.

The arenas DO have a small place in the lore, more of a little side story than anything. If you don't believe me, just go talk to the old arenamaster in nagrand.

Here is basically in a nutshell, the lore that gave birth to the arenas as is known at this point:

According to the old arena master in Nagrand, when the Dark Portal was reopened and the people of azeroth rediscovered Outland, the goblins stumbled upon the brown orcs participating in a time-honored ritual of hand-to-hand combat in an arena setting. The matches were conducted with honor, reverence and in a small not-so-public arena.

When the goblins saw this they saw instead a gold mine. They then did what goblins do best: "Moichendizing! Moichendizing! Moichendizing!" They took the tradition and ritual, greatly twisted and distorted it, and turned it into a gaudy, massive commercial affair that makes lots of gold. it proved to be so popular that they then brought it back to Azeroth with them where it exploded.

That's basically where the comic can fit in. Remember, that the story of the kidnapped King of Stormwind is not an old story, it's supposedly happening right now as the current in-game story ends in Dustwallow Marsh with hints that the Defias were transporting the king to some undisclosed location but escaped. That he became an arena fighter is basically possible because of the rapid growth of the arenas the goblins brought back through the Dark Portal.

Due to how recent this has happened, it's understandable that there isn't a lot of lore to support it and Blizz can easily build on it from here.

That being said however, I agree that the current implementation of Arenas needs to have it's own set of rules apart from the PvE game. I don't think Blizz needs to excise them from the whole game though, variety is a good thing. Blizzard has shown that they are able and willing to learn from experience and this is no different. No one knows what Wrath will bring.