I see the disconnect. The problem with the above is that the devs cannot provide you or anyone else with PVP. Only the players can. I don't know if Bigcheese is still around, but I give him credit for figuring it out. He always seemed fairly bitter that the playerbase was in his words "risk adverse", but to his credit he realized that it was the playerbase, and not the devs who were responsible.
I don't know what the pve/pvp breakdown is, but it is obviously enough to frustrate those who are yearning for pvp which is why we have this thread. That's not something the devs can change. Maybe it's the demographics, maybe it is because it's a space sim, but for whatever reason, a significant number of players have said, "no thank you" to pvp.
Last I saw, about every study on the subject agreed that humanity as a whole is risk-adverse. People that thrive on taking risks tend to be few and far between.
It's why, for example, entrepreneurs are celebrated; while they are doing a role that is needed to push forward technological and societal development, and one that when successfully done brings ample reward to the person, it's a role whose risks pushes most people away, even those that otherwise have the knowledge and financial resources needed to succeed.
For the DB twitch, I'm still listening (it is long), however, regarding the parts that he was talking about PvP being rare and meaningful it seemed to me to be in reference to pirating and griefing. Remember at the time there were no Community Goals, and Powerplay might not have even been a strong thought. I think it would be a stretch to apply the comment he made in a twitch feed regarding the griefing and pirating that was going on at that time to PvP in Powerplay.
Community goals only appeared with that name somewhat recently, but the concept was already in place at the start of the Kickstart, back in 2012.
Dev Diary #2 was basically about that.
And, BTW,
Dev Diary #1 was about the multiplayer element. And the first thing DB said about how the multiplayer would work is that players would be able to choose who they would play with, using groups or even going solo.
So, by the time he first talked about PvP being rare and meaningful, the ideas behind both the community goals and the group and solo aspects of the game were already in place. In fact, based on how the game was presented during the Kickstart, I would say that both events that decide how the galaxy will evolve based on player choice and players being able to choose who to play with are among the core concepts Frontier started with when designing ED.
Numerous anecdotal samples can comprise something worth looking into, so I am not concerned by that. Ultimately it is up to FD to look into it, not us; we can merely prompt them to do so if appropriate. Whether they choose to do anything about it will depend on what they want. So, in the end I don't think it matters if you or me don't have that data.
IMHO, anecdotal evidence alone can only be used to show that something exists and nothing more, even if there is a mountain of such evidence. Without research conducted with at least some scientific rigor you can't arrive at better conclusions based just on that evidence.
Take for example my time in WoW: I played on a PvP server, in a guild with over two hundred members, and to the last person my guild disliked non-consensual PvP, most also disliking open world PvP. I'm not naive enough to say that over two hundreds independent accounts of players in PvP servers that dislike open world PvP mean that most players are like this, it only serves to prove that not everyone in a PvP server is there for the PvP.
