Instead of using town or a spot in the wild, make a world built specifically for whatever type of arena staff needs. I only suggest this because it doesn't require a great deal of effort from Aikar to build, but he would need to do some things to activate it. The world should be limited in size to only the chunks required for the arena and to be considerate of chunk bounds during design. There would be no extra blocks, sounds, entities or tile entities or other residences and thereby limiting bandwidth needed. Lighting could be set to daylight or an ambient light level if desired to simplify shading. I think some other enhancements could be made to simplify the servers load, but those extra things could come anytime. I have a feeling this is how the dragon tombs arena will work, but that is a lot more complex due to automating mobs and other tasks rather than having a moderated event. A moderator or even a group of players could build an arena or copy the existing one and save it as a world by itself. Then use a world editor to strip out everything outside of that and set it to static so the server doesn't try to generate new chunks around the edges. Limiting the use of signs in favor of a button that gives a chat message (I think that system is already in place) should be easier on the server as well. I did some searching and didn't see anyone suggest this, but it seems as if it would be right down the same road as dragon tombs rather than a total distraction.
Well, it's not exactly the idea I was suggesting, but it's surely more along the lines than any of the other existing suggestions that I saw when searching. I will contact Maxarias, who is in charge of that and perhaps discuss some of my ideas. Thanks for the feedback.
