The arena tournament has opened it’s registration and you can now sign yourself up to participate in the competition. It’s $20 per account for each 6 week online qualifying round which is played out on the Arena Tournament Servers.
Once you qualify you will be able to fight in the live tournament rounds for cash prizes. [...]

Blizzard is going at it again folks. I appreciate the fact that Blizzard keeps going back to these testing events since a lot of players never get the chance to experience them. Here’s the official notice.
The World of Warcraft team will once again be testing the WoW Arena Tournament on the Tournament Test Realm, [...]

There seems to be a misconception on the TTR servers where players are assuming the purpose of the servers is strict PVP. I would imagine this idea is backed up by the fact that the entire game world is empty, barren, has no NPCs in it at all aside from the vendor NPCs located at [...]

We are aware of issues with the PTR and TTR.
Unable to create new characters.
Unable to Delete existing characters
Unable to connect to the realms
All of these issues are currently being investigated. We have no ETA for their resolution at this time.
Thank you for your patience. (src)
Hey nevermind Hortus fixed it.
Our connection [...]

Last night the PTRs/ and the TTR were brought down and then not too long after were brought back up with a new build. What’s good about this is that the Sunwell Plateau is active and working so perhaps Blizzard worked out all the kinks and raiding guilds testing the instance will be able to [...]

There happens to be a bug on the PTR/TTR where it will not validate the game version correctly. This sucks because what little testing we’re able to do now as the time grows shorter until release, is going to waste. At least Blizzard is aware of it.
We are aware of the issues with game [...]

Now this is purely speculation, but I’m pretty confidant that Patch 2.4 is going to be coming out within the next two to three weeks.
The background downloader  has been active for a little while now which usually means that most if not all the art assets (models and such) are good to go and the [...]

Thanks to mmo-champions for the high resolution images.
Currently we have only seen the retribution paladin set and the 2H sword from arena season 4. But it seems that Blizzard is already starting to tweak the gear some so that it feels more in line with the others (that they have yet to release and what [...]

We will be taking down the PTR and TTR today at 2:30 PM Pacific time to update to the latest build.
We expect the downtime to be between four and six hours.
Thank you for your patience. (src)

We’re once again bringing the fight to the Tournament Test Realm (TTR) and challenging players in the 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 arena brackets. Blizzard will be out in force taking on any challengers and making personal appearances near the various vendor locations.
The Tournament Arena Battle will take place on Wednesday between 5:00 PM PDT [...]

Let me break it down for you here in a simple sentence and then we’ll get to the mud slinging after the cut.

Today’s the big day when all of us peons get a chance to go head to head with the developers and community mods in the Arena. The TTR servers are pretty chaotic though. The lag is horrible and even with the changes to gear vendor NPCs there’s still crowding and countless jerks trying their best [...]

Sometime today we’ll be pushing new data to the PTR Tournament realm and once the update is made, players will now randomly spawn into one of the following locations upon character creation: more after the break

If you have ever wanted to kill any of the devlopers or community managers (in game) here is your chance as once again they will be entering the battlefield.
Are you ready to take on the world in the arenas? The World of Warcraft team will be testing the WoW Arena Tournament on the Tournament [...]

We are currently in the process of creating a lot more starting locations to ease congestion for the vendors. As a part of these new starting locations, we are also currently testing random spawning for newly created characters, which should evenly spread the population throughout all vendor locations. If you create a new character [...]

On the TTRs for the Arena Tournament there are serious lag issues due to the sheer number of players online crowded around the gear vendors making it virtually impossible to get any gear or to begin to skirmish with other teams. Hortus and the other Blizzard folks are working on a fix.
We can not [...]

Based on observation and player feedback we will be making some changes to the TTR starting areas to make the NPCs more accessible to everyone.
These changes may not make it into the next 2.4 PTR build update but they should definitely be in the following one.
[ Post edited by Hortus ] (src)
As well [...]

It looks like changing members of your team during the 2nd stage of the Arena Tournament will get you a 150 Team Rating penalty.
Right now on the TTR when you change members of a team the team rating is penalized 150 points.
When the real Tournament Realm season starts this will only occur during the [...]

Hortus released this update as to the status of the PTRs around 2:00AM today:
The PTRs and TTR (Test Tournament Realm) are both currently online.
The login servers are getting hit very hard so there may be some lag and delay in getting online, please be patient.   (src)