Why are so many people against Arena in Swtor?

i think he's saying he never wants to lose a fight and say to himself "i wonder who would have won if his gear didnt have a noticeable stat advantage", again though im just worried about the worst case scenario where people get tired of losing due to gear disparity and just quite the game.

Thats fine and so did most, but rated Arena's as the ONLY way to go about this isn't the answer for it, especially with how comp's matter more patch to patch than anything else. Yes, in WoW you had a better chance by being able to respec from one FOTM build to the next within your class, but with 2 AC's per class, you'd pigeon hole a good majority of players who can't switch from one AC to the next. The easiest way to implement Arena play would be how I, and others stated above. There's just way too many variables in game right now to make it more fair/skill based than FOTM based.

Implementing Arena's with non-gear rated rewards always opens up the door to adding gear based rewards at a later date when other aspects of the game have been ironed out, ie dual specs, AC respecing, better balance between DPS classes, etc. Compromise is always better than nothing in the end....

and yet only about 250,000 of them PvP above the 1700 rating bracket.

I trust you have a point, other than reinforcing the fact that people who care about competitive deathmatch (or any kind of competitive PvP, because ratings can now be gained through BGs) are a tiny minority of players.

http://hydramist.tv/movies/hydra5/ Comp matters yo, in the most broken bracket filled with as people have said, a lot of druid warrior(and druid variations in general), on the best battlegroup in Europe, in the top 10 for the entire season, priest warrior, what was the representation of that comp? anyone care to find it for me?. So whats his excuse for getting so high with such a unused comp?

The reason there are so many of a particular comp is because the ease of it. Druid warrior and Druid anything really, could make more mistakes and turn around matches, but were not un-beatable. People just got on the bandwagon of "Fotm" pushing the statistics every season to silly numbers for particular comps, you'd still find druid warriors (again just using this as an example) far below 1500. and you'd still find special snowflake comps far above 2k.

So you're saying that attracting and keeping 250,000 people (that's 12%, at absolute minimum, of SWTOR's playerbase btw) is a bad thing?

SO...with those numbers, that means only 2.3% of the 11 million PvP above 1700. Hmmm. Thats a HUGE percentage. :P

They're closer to 8 million. But anyway, 2% there is more than 10% of our players.
Scoff all you want. Blizzard doesn't care how much you laugh at their billions upon billions of dollars, frankly.

Actually, if you use the same percentage (250k out of 11m) and apply it to SWTOR numbers then you're only talking 39100 out of 1.7m.

No, we're talking about attracting those players to this game. So adding 250,000 to our 1.7 million.
Obviously some are already here and some wouldn't stay, but adding half of that is a 6% increase in subs. Nobody is going to leave over additional, optional PVP content as long as the gear is the same or lesser to currently available gear. So it's 100% win situation.

ADDING PvP CONTENT IS NEVER BAD. End of story. It's how you implement it.

Arena creates another dimension to an MMO, its highly competetive and if Bioware wants PvP in this game to get any kind of recognition, huttball aint gonna cut it, sry. PvP in this game as it stands is careface u just do them to get valor/gear thats all. Winning or loosing who cares aslong as u get ur medals.

arenas in wow was a giant success, and i bet it kept 100's of thousands of people interested in the game.

It also creates a separate community around it, people can upload theyr pvp movies from huttball as much as they want, but they dont mean anything at all. But a good arena movie ul see some skills and i bet it would get more people interested in the game aswell.