Welcome to Gaia! ::

The Avatar Arena forum or the AvA has been around since 2005 (note to Leo ;D )

The AvA forum is small, we are awash with critique threads which mainly b***h about the winners. However, it is not due to the fact we are jealous or sore losers - we just want to see the best avatars win and to be highlighted.

We are passionate about quality avatars and will often go out of our way to highlight great avatars that are currently up for voting (most never see the top ten). We are passionate about how the Arena is run, we want it to be fair for everyone while trying to ensure that people don't just enter 'just because'. We campaigned for an increase in the entry fee, even though we enter frequently - so that everyone will be more considerate of what they enter.

We campaign for fairness in advertising practices, to stop people with popular threads/guilds using those to advertise.

We campaign against the spotlight/All tabs in the Arena - 1st one to make it so people that have not be voted on will get more exposure and 2nd one will be got rid of as it gains more vote for those in the All tab.

When the Arena first came out, we help to shape it. We helped to get rid of the hourly update on who was winning, we got the voting/comment delay to stop people just clicking number for gold and copypasta comments.

We don't know what the new Arena will hold, as Lanzer has asked for comments and I hope he takes what we've said on board.

and despite what a lot of people think - we are not the majority that votes but we are the ones that judge - after the fact xd

Ah - note to self. Mention that a list of items be visable to moderators when an avatar is reported in the Arena so glitched avatars can be easily dealt with. I say this because I know it's more difficult to recognize glitched avatars these days

I can't really reply to that as a lot of those people are friends or people I know. I do remember that all of them were shocked by the results - because they didn't think that they would occupy the entire top ten - it was a group entry.

I will say that in the last few hours of any top ten, it will change drastically. There are people that do look for people to downvote. It has happened to me on so many occasions that I never take my rank for granted.

It was discovered that there was a glitch where by your score was visible - making it easier to downvote entries with a high score. This glitch has now been plugged - after months of nagging by arena regulars.