Y'all need to remember this really important point that Neranja implied but some of you need to read explicitly: Sharif is building a game for himself not for you. His guild got owned in ArcheAge because in spite of his rampant RMT and huge zerg, they were trash. He wants to build a game where he can feed his power fantasy just from having the biggest numbers, which includes choking out the economy for everyone else because he and his peeps can't press buttons to save their lives.
This is basically my worry. I am sure I will try it, when/if it makes it, but I have a lot of reservations the more I hear. Thankfully not invested in it at all, which I am sure will put me at a disadvantage when I do try it.
Will be more interesting to see if he and the company are quite happy spending all the time and money on what is simply a niche game, that will most likely have the population of one(given the direction its headed). Will he be happy just playing the multimillion dollar game he built for himself , even if its one server with just one guild basically dominating it, after a few months?
The big pvp guilds did play it. Some for a long time. These are the same toxic people you would recognize from daoc and shadowbane and darkfall. The mechanics of eve just didn’t allow the sort of advantage to pkers that those other games did so it survived.
the two core elements were a large pve space that let you play and progress with pvp and a territory control system that actually let you do a decent job of having your pvp squads protect your pve players.
EVE's system is great. Plenty of things for PVErs to do while safe. Even some risky PVE. They can ignore pvp, but they can also just be a tackling frigate(at least when I played) or a debuffer. Also could ignore the huge system fights and still be into pvp. Roles that were not all about ship power and damage. Also there was basically a built in time sink with skills. You are not hoping in, paying $2k and out destroying people that week(unless you bought a whole account maybe). These days finding a FFA pvp game without rampant p2w? Almost impossible. More so if it has no box price and no sub.
I think the sci-fi nature of the game and the PoV you play from(always in a ship and thats what you see) helps quite a lot also. Nothing comes close. Everthing before and after has basically been a high fantasy, 3rd person PoV, from your character's center.