I played many games, most of them with PvP enabled by default (serverside) or by design. I got used to the crowd that loves PvP or at least knows how to deal with it.
Same with WoW, PvP & PvE servers were similar, but both types had enough population to support any playstyle that was possible ingame. You always had enough people for anything. Nightraids with 25 people? Sure. Open PvP in the middle of nowhere just for the sake of it? Sure. City raids - yeah why not.
And there was a reason to split the community into PvE, PvP and the RP-PvE/PvP. It made sense and nobody complained. There we payed to switch the server, here you can just relog.
Looking at how open world PvP evolved in WoW is actually very interesting.
At first there was no instanced PvP. You wanted to fight, you went somewhere in the world and started attacking other players. Southshore became infamous as a permanent hotspot in most PvP realms, and even some PvE ones. Server transfers weren't available (except when Blizzard itself opened free transfers between specific realm pairs to reduce the population of overloaded realms). The original choice of PvP or PvE was, thus, all but unchangeable, which led to players that didn't quite want to be in PvP servers being stuck there. It was my case.
Then, somewhere down the line, Blizzard decided that this kind of unorganized PvP was doing more harm than good, preventing players from doing anything else in the more active zones for long stretches of time. The fact PvPers did choose to make a middle level zone their battlefield, of course, served to further force Blizzard's hand; it meant that the players that should be playing in those zones were powerless to even take part in the fight, and leveling back then was such a mess that skipping one zone was far more troublesome than now. So, Blizzard removed all rewards for open world PvP and opened instanced battlegrounds, and in a short time open world PvP decreased immensely, with most players going into the instanced battlegrounds as they chased the rewards. Blizzard itself decided that they had gone too far in removing PvP from the open world, but attempting to fix it would take time.
(For reference, at the time I was playing daily in one of the most active PvP realms. I was attacked perhaps once a week, unless I went looking for trouble. I think I was attacked only twice as I did the full Alliance version of the Barrens quests.)
Paid character transfers were introduced in the downtime before the first expansion, though there was a cooldown limiting how often they could be done and players couldn't change faction or move between PvP and PvE realms. Burning Crusade also included an attempt to bring back open world PvP: conflict areas in many of the maps, each with a different set of rules, with bonuses to the faction that controlled the objective and rewards the players that won that battle. Thus started WoW's huge issue with faction imbalance; the players of the weaker faction typically wanted to win, not to fight, so players started — first as a trickle, then a torrent — to transfer to servers were their faction was already winning, rather than try to rally and fight back. Ever wondered how servers like Illidan, Mal'Ganis, Sargeras, and Kel'Thuzad — to quote only those among the ten largest PvP realms — became so imbalanced the larger faction has over 10x more players than the smaller one? They weren't like that at first.
An interesting moment was the Zombie Invasion event that happened as Burning Crusade drew to a close. For a week it allowed players to turn into zombies and attack every non-zombie player, including those of their own faction. Many players simply loved that event, but what seemed to be an equally large number utterly hated it; the forums were taken by both praise and complaints, the moderators were working overtime to try to bring the forums back into a semblance of order, and even some devs were pressed into helping calm down the players that disliked the event. In an unprecedented move, Blizzard even revealed when the event would end ahead of time to allay the concerns of the complaining players and offered game time refunds to players that demanded it. To this day they keep the information of how exactly the player base reacted locked, though the fact none of the three expansion launch events since came even close to allowing that much mayhem seems to indicate things didn't end particularly well for Blizzard.
Wrath of the Lich King showed how grave the imbalance issues were. It introduced Wintergrasp, a conflict zone in the middle of the new continent, with bigger rewards than ever to the controlling faction. The issue is that, in imbalanced realms — which, by then, were most of them — one faction completely dominated Wintergrasp; in one of the realms I played, one that wasn't even too imbalanced (about 3 horde players for every 2 alliance ones at the time), the leading faction won roughly 95% of the fights, and that wasn't an exception as far as realms go. Players of the smaller faction, in most imbalanced realms, started to not even show up to the fight, and the realms further moved towards having just one noteworthy faction. Open world PvP, even in the single zone constructed for PvP, died to the point I was using Wintergrasp as my regular fishing spot, and was attacked perhaps once per month.
There were another two blows to open world PvP during Wrath of the Lich King. The first is that the restrictions on paid character transfers were relaxed, with players now able to transfer between PvP and PvE realms. The second was the introduction of the Looking for Dungeon tool, which allowed players to just queue for dungeons, being teleported there when the tool assembled a group for them; with it, players were able to just get to the minimum level for the first instanced dungeon — which can be done without ever setting foot outside the zones where PvP is restricted — and from then on just stay in the safety of a city jumping from dungeon to dungeon. This way, players that intended to play in PvP realms became able to reach max level without risking a PvP encounter even once, be it because they leveled only by doing instanced content, or because they leveled in a PvE realm and then transferred to a PvP one.
After that I don't have much first hand experience with the subject anymore; I left with Cataclysm (over the removal of the portals, of all things; I can't stand how boring travel is in WoW) and, while I attempted to come back in Mists of Pandaria, finding out just how much I hate daily quests sent me packing again (they truly plagued that expansion). Though from reading the forums and specialized press, it seems like Blizzard's efforts to balance the realms and bring back open world PvP were mostly a failure, with both PvPers and PvE players complaining about each such attempt, and world PvP remaining mostly inexistent in most realms.
Also noteworthy is how the rewards for winning (and consolation prizes for losing) always distorted the instanced battlegrounds; when most people in the fight are there due to the reward, rather than playing for the fun of it, strange things happen. It started, innocently enough, with players completely ignoring the objectives of the map to just make a big brawl in the middle; with the rewards for killing another player, this was more effective in getting rewards than trying to win, and after a while more organized groups started to just line out each side in turn to be slaughtered without fighting back, guaranteeing the largest possible number of kills per minute. When Blizzard reduced the rewards for kills, players started to simply go capture the objectives, not fighting even if they bumped into each other by accident. When winning rewarded far more than losing, players in the side that started to lose would simply start leaving the match, turning what should have been a ten minutes fight into a minute long brawl; when Blizzard increased the rewards for losing, trying to make players remain in the fight to the end, groups started to be organized to just lose as many matches as they could, as fast as they could, gaining rewards for little to no effort. For something that seems simple, WoW's battlegrounds had more than their fair share of issues.
So my point in the end is - we need more people in open, that would help and create more interaction.
I cant force anyone to buy this game, but i can ask people to join the open mode and actually enjoy it. Nobody has to follow, but why people try to stop anyone who wants it?
Open mode is not the bloody world with psychos, murders and pirates everywhere, nice people also play there and you would not believe me - they enjoy it.
I don't have anything against players trying for themselves game modes that allow non-consensual PvP, but I truly think you are deluding yourself if you believe most players that do try will enjoy it and remain; my own experience, plus what little reliable info about that I could find, points to the "silent majority" in most games being far more averse to unwanted player interaction than the forum denizens.
What I am completely against is offering any kind of extra reward or incentive to bring players into a mode where PvP can happen. That just makes players that would rather not subject themselves to PvP play in a way they don't enjoy, a way that speeds up how quickly they will burn out, for the rewards, and IMHO is very damaging for the game in the long run.
BTW, the arguments about PvP not being that common and open needing a bonus to be on an equal footing are at odds. If PvP is as rare as you indicate, then any efficiency loss in open is smaller than the statistical error, and no bonus is needed; if a bonus is needed, then it means that players are attacked enough to impact their performance, which means it's enough to completely change the experience and make the mode unenjoyable to those that don't want to constantly fight other players.
