[Eonwe]

I'd like the arena battles to have some sort of NPC you wager with. Normally I am not big on using NPCs for anything, but I think you'd really need one in this case. The arenas could even be player owned possibly, but you could have the equivalent of an NPC merchant, except that he would facilitate bets rather than buy and sell items. You would place a bet with the NPC, and you would recieve a bet slip from the NPC. Your slip could be stolen/looted off of you in the arena. On the outskirts of the arena there will be guards that will enforce the normal laws. In addition to the normal laws, if you interfere in any way with the arena battle you'll be killed. So there is some risk in having the betting slips and having an NPC does not make everything completely safe. Arenas should have some level of protection, but you are in a room full of bloodthirsty people, you can't expect complete safety.

I'm not sure how you'd handle people getting their friends to fight and then all of them wager against their friend as the throws the fight. There must be some mechanic you can put in place to combat this, because I think this would ruin the arena battles. One thing I think would encourage players to not throw fights would be to track their win-loss ratio. Payouts could be based off of this ratio as well. There would be a comparison of the w/l ratios of the competitors and you could have the payouts listed based off of that. The gist of that is, if a group of amazing PvPers are going up against a pretty poor group of PvPers you will win a greater amount of money betting on the poor group of PvPers.

Each weekend the arenas could shift from player fights to gladiator battles including monsters and humanoid NPCs. I think this could have the potential to fill the arenas and get a lot of bets going.