[quote=@yoshua171]
I'm not gonna make too huge a commentary, but I'd like to point out something about #3. I feel that letting all the players more or less offer opinions on characters wouldn't really work as it'd just create a constant argument. Plus some people are better at withholding their personal bias than others and those who cannot would make it...less than pleasant. I know from experience.

However, a way to perhaps moderate character balance better would be one of the following:

>Have a review team for all arena characters.
or
>Have multiple GMs/Tournament hosts with different ideas of balance, but similar skills in balancing. I prefer this one as it keeps chatter to a minimum and makes sure that even if one person's balancing skills are accurate, that they have someone to check for any missed points, mistakes, or the like. It also makes the process less one sided. Lastly, when/if a player questions the balance you can have more than one person who has reviewed it, which lends to a sense of meticulousness and thorough examination, whereas just one person leads to the argument of "well, they're just one person and people make mistakes." Not that more than one person couldn't miss stuff too, but that's beside the point really.
[/quote]

Funnily enough, Skallagrim sent me all the characters sent in for NoW. It didn't help too much. My role was mainly to just check over them out of curiosity.