[@Buddha] Yes I agree with you the the Arena isnt as popular as other sub forums.
Yes I agree that it's been especially sparse lately. 

But none of this is a good reason to merge. 1x1 is story driven collaborative writing, arena is non-collaborative creative competition, the fact that Arena [i]usually [/i] takes place between two people doesn't mean it is the same thing as 1x1 story, both have their place. The reason why it is separate is because of the format and the motivation. There are other better ways to advertise. A good way is to use the general interest threads to announce tournaments or exhibition matches. We also could do better to include a wider range of combat types, instead of just 'badass vs badass' we should be hosting mecha battles, warplane dogfights, and small army warfare, which could get more people interested.

Like I said before, I'm all for improving the Arena, and I would be happy to help give it a kick in the right direction, but being merged with a thread that has nothing to do with what we are about will just piss people off, and make people want to give up on the RP combat completely if they feel they don't have a platform that supports it, and what happens in the long run? We just lose more users which is counter to what you are trying to achieve with this thread.

Tabletop is extremely unique, I cant speak for that community, but I imagine that having RP rules based on d20 and GURPS systems definately put you outside of the realm of anything you will find in Free, Casual and Advanced, it doesn't seem fair to take away that platform. I get that they are somewhat alienated from the traditional RPers but that comes with the territory of providing a platform for the niche. 

Nation I don't know that much about, I assume that having a different mindset to RPing as a faction as apposed to a character is quite significant to how they write and interact with each other. But thats about all I can say, you'd have to speak to an NRPer for more details.

Anyway, in short, I think having niche sections for specific interests does more for the guild. Free, Casual and Advanced Regulars arent going to leave the site just because Arena, Nation and Tabletop arent as popular as their threads, I'm sure they either don't care or like the fact they can jump into something different one day if they feel like it.

But people WILL start leaving if you delete/merge maybe the only reason they are on the site. I do regular RPs now, but when I just started I only came to the guild for the duels, if that was taken away I would have left the site, and I know for a fact I wouldn't have been the only one.