I also agree the Match Play Arena is a disaster and no use to veteran and new players alike. A lot of them come there. They don’t come back.
The Free For All area should be moved to the old (now inaccessible) furball lake as new players can reference the horizon more easily there. AI should attack one per human player ONLY and not break off or reassign if a new player comes in - this to flexibly support the emergent co-operative gameplay which often begins there.
AI airframes which cannot endure 3G should not be dogfighting. Similarly the AI should be constrained to the same turn and entropy-rates as human players. If a new player sees that, he will assume he is the limit when he cannot match those rates and become disillusioned. Worst I have heard comments that they cheat - which after all is correct, they are endorsed hackers of the flight-model. AI assignments should only make up numbers to always even.
The duelling queues should be removed and replaced with starting ‘gates’ allowing players to choose their opponents. Retain the random-position air-spawns.
Additionally there should be a pan-arena ticker tape, system announcement, live web-feed or other that there are people looking to duel. Right now, checking when you log in notwithstanding there is no way to know beyond logging out of your active arena and looking at the arena splash screen.
ELO should be removed as it was added to support a now abandoned feature and is as counterproductive as the AI - people log in, see a high ELO, they log out.
With the present arena disposition of AH it is unclear where the owner(s) think newer players should go? The empty TA? Steal the Sheep, are they to think AH is a WWI game? Even if they immediately buy a subscription the MA is now almost exclusively populated by highly seasoned vets, grinding out long-established and risk-averse gameplay. That’s only interesting to a small and now an increasingly smaller group…