And I do actually feel bad about that. I really do. It’s been years, and this game has been a dumpster fire on official PVP servers pretty much all that time. Frankly, when I compare what my grievances in PVE are with what I keep hearing about PVP, I’m astonished that long-time PVP players like you have persisted all this time.
So don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that PVP shouldn’t be made better. I’m just trying to find a way we can all talk together about making Conan Exiles better in general. And for my part, I’ll try to tone down my occasional frustrated jabs at the PVP community.
FWIW, that doesn’t feel condescending, it just feels incomplete.
I mean, yeah, how much we’re willing to risk is a huge factor in the decision we make on which game mode we want to play. But that’s not all, and in a way it’s almost like mixing up cause and consequence.
You might have seen me write about what I believe is the design philosophy behind Conan Exiles, about how it tries to attract and cater to a really diverse playerbase. People who like survival games, people who like MMOs, people who like competitive PVP, people who like RP, people who like exploring, collecting, building, yadda yadda yadda. I’ve written about that before.
You’ve also seen me mention the Bartle taxonomy of player types. It’s imprecise, it has been met with valid criticism, it has been expanded on, but the important thing is that it serves as an approximation, at least.
Both of these themes have one thing in common, and that’s players’ motivation for playing Conan Exiles. Yes, we all like this game, but we like different aspects of it to different degrees. People who play on PVP servers are generally people who are motivated strongly enough by that aspect of the game that they’re willing to make the necessary allowances. (And yeah, I know you’ll point out that you scored only 33% killer on Bartle’s test, but we’ve been over that, too 
)
What I’m trying to say is that it’s not useful to reduce something as complex as the player’s motivations for playing the game down to their choice of game mode, and then assert that the only real difference is that PVP is superset of PVE-C is superset of PVE.
“They’re all the same but for the risk you’re willing to take” is true in a narrow sense. Yes, it’s the same game, with same underlying game mechanics, with the same primary, secondary, and tertiary gameplay loops, in the same setting, based on the same source material, etc. But we don’t play it for the same reasons, and the choice of game mode tells you something important about those reasons.
As an interesting corollary, the more you go towards the PVE end of the game mode spectrum, the less you know about the player’s motivations. If they play on a PVP server – especially if it’s an official PVP server – you can be sure that the inter-player conflict is something that motivates them quite a bit. If they play on a PVE server, they could be into building, or collecting, or socializing, or RP, or whatever. Who knows? All you know from their choice of game mode is that the “killer” aspect of PVP is either not important enough to them or it’s directly against what they want.