Why are you kicking up the pointless numbers again, about PVE/PVP in other games? You already were proven wrong, and your last comment just highlighted it even more.
Where was I proved wrong?
For example, you aren't talking about empirical data, you are talking about what you think is a fact, based on an assumption. If you have empirical data, link some of the sources for the games you mentioned.
Like LotRO devs saying that almost no one uses their PvP option, or EVE devs saying that most of their players never get to engage in PvP? (Well, the EVE one was second hand, but it's a report on a stream by the EVE devs.)
If you have any examples of devs saying that PvP is prevalent, in a game where both PvP and PvE are viable, perhaps you should point them? I pointed two places were devs said they have problems with PvP being partaken in by too few. I could also hunt down the dev posts about how PvP was removed from Firefall during the Beta because almost no one was playing it, if you want.
Also, the WoW numbers you mention, if they are even accurate, put PVE players just 10% more than PVP players. So, thats your earlier argument from your previous comments blown completely out of the water. You said a 'majority' of people play PVE and not many play PVP. 10% difference is nothing, so you were totally wrong, with your empirical assumptions.
Majority is typically defined as more than half (or half plus one if going for the common legal definition). A side with 10% more players is a majority.
And this doesn't take into account the players that are on a PvP realm but don't actually want to engage in PvP. My whole guild back in WotLK was like this, we were in a PvP server for various reasons but few, if any, of the players in the (200-strong) guild had any interest in PvP. Thankfully open world PvP in WoW is as rare as hen's teeth even on fairly balanced PvP realms like the one we played on.
Not only that, in the EU, which is where i live and what i care about, more PVP servers exist for WoW than PVE servers. Im not bothered about US servers, just like 9 times out of 10, no one on a US server even knows EU servers exist let alone cares about what numbers they put out. Regardless, WoW server data is highly innacurate and changes dramatically year to year anyway, depending on expansions, new content and free server transfers.
And the servers available to me are the US ones, though I do make an effort to look at the EU ones (and would look at the Chinese ones if information on them was available). If you want a point to stick, better to avoid biases.
Also, number of servers is not a direct indication of popularity. A funny tidbit reinforces that: while counting just EU servers wield 123 PvE and 144 PvP servers, when you consider each connected realm group (i.e., the merged-in-all-but-name realms) as a single realm, there are 67 PvE "realms" and 57 PvP "realms" in Europe. Of course this is in part because PvP realms need a higher population, so open world PvP has an actual chance of happening, but it does show an interesting trend.
BTW, I've been tracking WoW servers, and things like PvP/PvE balance and Alliance/Horde balance, ever since realm tracking sites first appeared, and while there have been some fluctuations, the overall values remained surprisingly stable. The PvP to PvE balance has been like that — about 3 PvE players for every 2 PvP players in the US, and close to balanced with a small PvP advantage in Europe — for at least half a decade (and three expansions). Faction balance also didn't change; Alliance has a slight advantage overall, but when you break it down by PvP and PvE, Alliance has a large advantage in PvE and Horde has an even larger advantage in PvP (which is why PvPers tend to think that everyone plays Horde). Server imbalance has changed for worse; of all the servers I've directly monitored, imbalance has only grown worse as time goes by. And, before you say that faction balance has no bearing on this discussion, imbalances can kill PvP even when the game systems allow, or incentive, it; when I say that many of the largest WoW PvP servers might as well be single faction PvE ones, I'm not joking, there is no PvP happening there because the opposite faction is, for all practical purposes, absent.
(That imbalance is a reason Ashran, the open world PvP zone in the new expansion, is seen by many players as a failure. Thanks to faction imbalance, in many, perhaps most, realms the smaller faction is always being curbstomped and for the most part decided to not get into the zone, since playing there without any chance of victory is seen as a complete waste of time; meanwhile, due to the server trying to balance the number of players from each faction in the zone, the larger faction can't get in because queues are always full, since the server is only allowing the minimum number of players into it due to the other side not having even that minimum number inside.)
As for death hurting, you COMPLETELY IGNORED, my point about how easy it is to avoid threats in open mode. As usual, another person that can't go straight up with someone's comment, but instead has to slide and sidle around by either manipulating quotes, or in this case, ignoring valid points from other posters.
Easy for you. Likely easy for me if I ever get into open; I'm the kind of person that typically RTFM before even installing the game, to the point I've read most of the Industrial Sized Knowledgebase before my short stint in EVE (easier then than now because at the time I think it was only one volume; either that or I ignored the PvP volume out of lack of interest).
For a common player, though? Be realist. While trying to educate the player base is a noble (though often futile) effort, devs have to build the game for the players they have, not for the players they wished they had. Heck, if we could just make other players learn even just the easy and obvious things about a MMO, raiding wouldn't be compared with herding cats (and I would likely still be happily raiding in WoW).
And anyway, I was talking about how death in ED hurts, and how in games where death hurts players go to great lengths to avoid it, even if it means avoiding anything even barely exciting and killing their fun. Which is part of why the risk of a setback is a powerful force to get players out of open and into solo (or group) over any kind of player-based threat, real or just perceived. A dev here said something of the kind
in another thread, pointing that losing a ship is non-trivial for most pilots and that he believed having a player that commits in-game crimes have a more or less permanent target on his back would likely stop players committing crimes altogether.
