The real downside is the removal of the PvP Tower. This is a big deal for serious GvG fighters, but not because of the points or ability to compare yourself (though that can be nice). Because of the PvP tower, the "auto battle" button and "ok" button on the fight recap screen are aligned, which allows people to fight really quickly without having to move the mouse for each battle. This is not quite as impactful in GbG as you have to move your mouse to start each new fight, but it still speeds things up.
With the removal of the PvP tower the end of battle recap is smaller, and because it is centered on the screen the buttons no longer align. This means you have to move your mouse for every GvG action, slowing you down a lot. This is especially bad for people with repetitive strain injuries or increase the risk of getting it for very serious fighters, this would definitely make me quite GvG outright, and would make me less active in GbG.
This also makes the difference between cheaters and legit players much worse, at the moment you can keep up using this trick, but if it was removed cheaters would have a serious advantage.
There is a very simple solution to this, simply increase the battle recap size again so it's the same size as with the PvP tower (or move it slightly). As I said at the top I think the PvP Arena is some harmless fun, so if the removal of the PvP tower and its impact on gvg, gbg fighting is addressed, I'd have no issue with it at all, but as it is right now it would seriously impact big fighters.
I agree with all of Moo's points on this. With respect to the PvP Arena - the fighting is still fairly gimmicky and boring. Since you don't lose points for losing fights, it doesn't provide much incentive boost defense still. The rewards are still super weak and uninspiring. Top players that are able to do tons of fights won't really get much benefit from the rewards, and newer players will not be able to keep up with the fighting demands needed for top ranks.
Suggestion: Add more avatars and/or cosmetic benefits. Players would be more interested in competing for these type of rewards.
The bigger issue is removing the existing pvp tower for several reasons. One reason is simply that it's fun to compete against other players in towers. It's fun getting an idea of how much you're fighting in various ages compared to your rivals or guildmates. It is competition that drives players improve! No one really cares about the medal rewards - it's about bragging rights
Finally, and most importantly, with the pvp tower disabled, it would mess up the alignment for fighting confirmation in both gbg and gvg. This provides a terrible for user experience/user interface. The extra mouse movements will add up over time and cause injury (i actually had to move to trackball due to work mouse usage - a game requiring that much more usage is no good). Furthermore, Macro users would benefit from this greatly as they are not dependent on good ux/ui. They can setup their clicks to be anywhere, so while they are unaffected, players that are fighting in a legitimate manner stop being able to compete with macro users. This change might as well hand over the game to macro users and/or put a big sign saying "macro users wanted."
At a minimum, for ux/ui purposes, the confirmation window should be resized to match the size it would be if the tower was still in tact. But i do think most users still want and would miss the pvp tower.
I would prefer a random positioning of the OK button.
This would slow down everyone except cheaters and thus make it easier for operators to identify and ban them.
Seeing how fast someone fights will never be proper evidence for cheating. There is a super easy to way to catch macro users. It would catch them using macros for anything including: collecting city/resetting production, aid/tavern, Recurring quest cycling, and of course, various fighting gvg/gbg actions.
All inno needs to do is use a mouse heatmap script. Google mouse heatmap script for a ton of options.. If a user is too frequently clicking the same pixel, clicking with unnatural frequency/no delday, and moving the mouse across the same path, they would be marked as a macro/bot user, and get banned. It's such an easy fix that it's mind boggling that inno hasn't done this already. From a privacy standpoint, i'm sure there are ways that this can be made compliant.