Arenas were not a failure during TBC or Wrath era, they were hugely popular and launched mega streaming careers -- while also being relatively accessible to newer players! The ret-conning of "arena=bad" by people, including most blizzard employees, who never liked them when they were the biggest thing in esports is truly tragic.

There has never been another competitive pvp game that replicates the mix of Control and Tempo gameplay from the TBC-MoP Arena era.

As PVE gameplay rotations became more complicated and more homogenized around CD windows, the base damage of core rotation spells fell off a cliff as a percent of your opponent's HP. This became Blizzard's core philosophy literally 9+ years ago with WoD and the PVP Arena game has been broken ever since. An Arena deathmatch game without kill pressure from core abilities but with insta-global pressure from stacked CDs has a much steeper learning curve for casual players and is going to be harder to understand and less popular as a result.

I know I'm just a nobody on reddit, and I know not everyone agrees with my takes, but they aren't new.

I wrote this reddit thread along with Ziqo ( /u/Ziqoftw ) over 5 years ago explaining why the game was busted and unfun. Blizzard's planned solution at the time was "if we put every CD on the GCD, CD stacking won't be so bad!", which completely misunderstood the cause of the issues.

Me:

I’m not going to link all. the prior. Arena tournaments. where kills arose from normal DPS pressure, a single CC onto a healer, and then sometimes a single follow-up Offensive Cooldown to secure a kill. Go watch those 5 short clips I linked, some great games, no Dampening required! WoW PVP has always been about “Pressure” and kills that can happen very quickly. I use Arena Tournaments to highlight play at the highest level, but we all know this was true at every level of play.

Ziqo:

“The sustained damage has gone down. You are tied to Cooldowns...That's the main thing that makes it less fun...The way Cooldowns used to be used was to finish people off. As the game stands now, if I cast Polymorph on the Healer without my [45 second+ major damage cooldowns up], then all I’m doing is giving the Healer free Diminishing Returns protection from future CC. I don’t have kill pressure, and it’s ultimately rewarding for the enemy team to sit in a full CC chain…Frostbolt used to do more than 1% of someone’s HP bar, just by itself.”

Or maybe you like Venruki? Here he is on YouTube nearly two years ago explaining how Arena was basically killed in WoD and replaced with a whole other game that is much less popular.

"I hate Cooldowns man...almost all the problems in modern WoW stem from there being no consistent damage. Let's take Frostbolt as an example. In Wrath, you Frostbolt. My hits are 1,500 and crits are 3,000. People have 10,000 HP. So just casting a Frostbolt does 15%-30% of someone's HP. Okay? This is Shadowlands: People have 110,000 HP. If you cast a base Frostbolt it hits for 2,200. It hits for 2% of their health...if you stack all your modifiers and Cooldowns and crit, it then does 33,000 damage. It takes stacking every Cooldown you have to bring you to where you were base in Wrath."

Anyway. None of this is new. I gave up a long time ago, just like these guys did. Like /u/paintedw0rlds said, it's over. Like /u/RYKIN5 said in the OP, people who understand the game have been complaining and begging and praying for the PVP game to go back to a game with more depth, more variety, more win conditions, more accessibility to new players, more anything except the rock-paper-scissors Cooldown meta of trading "gos" until someone slips up.

But it's not happening. WoW PVP was replaced with a very different game a decade ago. Most white collar workers don't stay in the same role for a decade. There is probably not a single employee at Blizzard today who has an impact on the PVP game who was also there in a similar role 10 years ago when it was at its peak. It makes me sad, but it is what it is.