Heaven_Leigh_Treasure
I also think that there should be some increased publicity and, education, if you will regarding the arenas and the associated 'etiquette' of participating in the arenas.
This is an important idea, I think. I know it's terribly hard to try to influence user's actions in an online forum like this, but the right kind of appeal can make a difference. Something that puts the right spin on the idea.
Lanzer
As for the spotlighting and how uneven entries are being voted, that is a problem with the current arenas, and all these problems are slated to be fixed. That's actually what drove us to re-write arenas in the first place. We outsourced the project and it went really wrong. This time we're doing it with our own team which will do things right.
Lanzer
Down-voting is an activity that the system should be able to detect and minimize in terms of damage. The old arenas did that but not the current one, I'm confident that the new arenas should have something similar.
I'm seeing a lot of replies that are talking about how the new system will increase down-voting. It sounds like the developers are aware of this, see where the problem is, and have a solution that was working reasonably well before they tried some time-saving measures with the new arena. If they think they can fix that, then I think they can fix that.
Overall, I do think the change is a good idea, but it'll need some developer love and attention
after it's implemented to make sure that the problems people are mentioning don't crop up.
Edit: I forgot I was going to mention, but I think that it's important to make submissions with fewer votes more likely to show up for people to vote on.