Arena also has the biggest rewards for PVP.
....thats about it.

I think Arena caters to the people who are, on the whole, more likely to exploit loopholes.

People love arena because it takes much more individual skill and strategy than a BG or world PvP. The fun is in learning to work together as a team and being the best that you personally can in order to contribute better to the team. You learn strategies when fighting teams, in the end if you do well you have rewards to prove it. It also offers the most fair and skill appropriate matches for you through the rating system so that you are constantly challenged.

Like you said though, the worst of class balancing really starts to shine. It sucks when you realize that 90% of the top 10 teams are Warrior/Druid or Rogue/Druid and that there is really no way for another team of equal skill to overcome the massive class balancing issues. Even still, it is alot of fun for those who take it seriously.

Wow, for people that hate arena so much, you don't know much about it.

To SH. I am glad you like them. But skill differential is a much smaller part than Gear differential. I don't care how skilled you are, if the gear differential between you team is big (S3 versus Quest gear) then you will lose. I don't care how good you are. You want to learn to work as a team? Raiding is good for that also.

LOLATU: You user name tells me you are a great arena fan. and pretty much sums up my biggest problem with the Arena's, they cater to the jerks in the game and make the jerks more powerful.

Good to see you back up your anti-arena argument with reason. You dislike people who do arena which means it's bad, nice logic.

It certainly does have problems with balance but the whole game is full of balance issues, PvE and PvP, ever wonder why some classes are more popular in raids? Exploits? Lol, the top PvE guild on my server was banned for exploiting ZA bear runs.

Provide some facts rather than insults and whining and maybe you wont be the one coming off as a jerk in your comments. ;)

Lolatu: You asked for it then. :-)

Arena's cater to the fast twitch teener crowd. It turns WoW into a FPS like Battlefield Earth. Simply playing enough means you earn gear, win or lose.

Since the reason I play wow is I dislike the whole FPS game, having Blizz add this element to the game makes me 'unhappy'.

I like BG PVP. Because the PVP is goal oriented, not just 'pwn the noobs' twitch fests.

What I hate most about the arena's is that they reward people disproportionate to others (BG epics are a long grind, Arena epics 1/2 the time, PVE epics 2x the time). And they reward the socially 'worst' players.

So yeah, I hate arena's because I hate the people who get off on them.