In the early months private PVP servers were the most popular and in many ways it can be said that the game started off as primarily PVP.
Probably the biggest event that changed the focus of Funcom from PVP to other interests was the buyout from Tencent.
It pains me to think too that there was once the exploit hunters and Funcom actively communicated on wanting to deal with exploits quickly.
This is a couple months old but does speak a lot on my thoughts about PVP on Officials.
Here is a summarization of most issues on PVP but also a bit dated.
We once had better defence but it was at the cost of server stability and time. There were bases you had to attack all raid window and STILL could not reach the core. The removal of fence stacking was the right thing to do.
I don’t think a base should be taken down in 30 minutes which is pretty standard offlining.
However.
The hope is that there are defenders on and in direct combat. But how often does that actually happen except for those hardcore groups? Sieging rarely happens now. I’d feel bad about gutting a noobs base so I wait patiently for them to build up and have some semblance of defence and if it happens where I attack, they rage quit. They don’t know enough, are patient enough or have the emotional maturity to not panic.
But almost guaranteed if I take a night off they’re offlining me.