There are a few factors
I understand what you mean by “the incentive is to have fun” this does work in most genres, but MMORPGS players want progression and rewards, which is why end game is usually centered around those concepts.
WOAH! I don’t stand there, I leave and queue for another OPR instead 
So the responses seem to be along the lines of ‘we want to PVP but only if we get rewarded for doing it’ - which is so diametrically opposed to the reason we used to PVP 20 years ago that I’m going to not comment further in case I say something that might hurt people’s feelings.
It has slowed down significantly. Asmo was like 89 gold on my server yesterday
You’re basically just feeding the zerg kills, and score, you know that right? Better to get that particular game over with and get in to a new game where teams might be even and fun.
Your tactic of go take another base just leads to the zerg running to the bases destroying everyone, going to the next base, rinse repeat. I’ve only ever been in a handful of games where your tactic has ever worked against a zerg team. Every other game leads back to the zerg standing outside the starter base killing everyone after retaking the bases.
And to be honest if you and others don’t like it maybe convince NW developers to implement a balanced match making system so one side is not overwhelmed. Maybe even convince them allowing a pre made 5 team is stupid because it can cause imbalance for a OPR match.
Just wait till Leaderboards are released and everyone is playing AOE builds and classes to get a high score, not necessarily kills or even wins.
Also I don’t stand there I shoot the zerg for points while staying safe. I get score they get zero off me and only off someone else if stupid enough to run out in the zerg as a martyr and give them score and kills. Work smarter not harder 
best comment
What a pinnacle end game lmao. Farming for gear.
This i agree with
There is no need to get this personal about it, times have changed, 20 years ago there were barely any games out there and gaming wasn’t that popular, I also doubt that you happen to know why everyone was doing PvP and I’m sure every game that was released at that time had very good rewards attached to open world PvP.
An important aspect to keep in mind would be that in order to remain competitive or to have fun in PvP you need to have enough gold to purchase strong gear, weapons and runeglasses which are quite expensive for the average player, now comes the need to have consumables which are very expensive, you are free to go in there with none of these and no consumables but I think the interesting part of PvP is being able to win against other players and if you don’t have what others have then you won’t have fun because you will most likely die over and over.
Therefore the importance for rewards to be able to progress and have fun, that’s also how PvE works, the fun part comes from the rewards rather than killing enemies or completing quests, that’s why players love raids so much even if some parts tend to be annoying, they have immense rewards for the time invested.
If OPR didn’t gave rewards, it would be even more difficult for purely PvP players to play the game and have fun.
People say just pvp for fun… but most of us complaining have done so for over 1000 hours… after a while the fun starts fading without some kind of incentive to work for that further reinforces the feeling of “fun”
You were playing 20 years ago PVP to literally RUIN someones life.
There was ALWAYS an incentive in old mmorpgs to PvP.
God dammit pvp was always the encouraged thing to do which was just highly risky bringing consequences with it.
It’s not the same here, and “just pvp for fun” doesn’t work when there’s no company caring about the “fun” part keeping up with balance issues.
God even League has balance patches EVERY 2 WEEKS.
So trying to ride the “look how old and cool I am” is not working mate.
The game is left hanging esp for pvp’ers. They don’t do anything and it’s a frustrating experience to see something you somewhat enjoy just wasting away and same time playing through this misery it is by now has absolutely 0 incentive to do so.
You could just aswell let them remove all loot drops from m10’s cause why would you need an incentive to enjoy difficult content.
The difficult content is what you’re striving for so loot doesn’t matter at all.
it might not be a priority, but it all matters.
Yea…
I’m wanting to setup a couple different builds. Don’t want to waste funds on rolling something that may be good now, but garbage in a few weeks.
Perfect summation.
In general, people play games to have fun and be entertained. I think New World does a pretty good job at both, but after a while, the grindiness/repetitiveness of the “end game” options for PVP slowly sap the fun and joy from it. Doing something without a reward (part of the excitement/fun) is counterintuitive to the reason a game exists, which is for fun and entertainment.
Open world pvp is quite fun, because the terrain is different, the players are different, you do not know if you are going to be attacked, you do not know if the person you are stalking is aware of you, etc. but it is definitely not rewarding, in the current state of the game. Back when the PVP tracks first came out, I would spend most mornings going to the various forts to kill whomever was capping, just to get the PVP XP. Sometimes I would win, sometimes I would lose, but it was at least fun and exciting.
After completing the PVP track at 200, I had hoped for better rewards than the first 1-199 tracks, but sadly, the rewards are pretty much garbage, with the exception of the Gold, Faction Tokens, Umbral Shards and Gypsum Orbs. I am, roughly, somewhere in the 500’s for PVP tracks completed now, but it is hard to tell exactly how many, since I do not keep an active count and the game UI does not show you anything after 200.
WIthout some kind of incentive for open world PVP, there is not much of reason to do it, as opposed to OPR, which gives you a loot box, gold, shards, tokens and PVP XP.
I was trying to ruin people’s lives? What are you on about lol?
EQ2 started as a PVE game. A year or two after launch, there was a request from the playerbase to add PVP so they added PVP servers. Everyone who made a toon on the PVP servers, by definition, wanted to PVP.
How you get from that to ‘ruining peoples lives’ I don’t know.
Personally I did most of my PVP solo and always had certain rules: don’t engage players who are lower level than me, and don’t engage single players if I’m in a group. When you you were out and about, sometimes you’d encounter players who were the same level but were clearly not up for a fight or just weren’t very good at fighting. I let those players go.
And yet I still managed to have the most fun I’ve ever had in gaming - without griefing or without needing any reward other than enjoying a good, fair fight.
That you scorn people who can enjoy playing like this says a lot about you as a person - none of it good.
When you realize New Worlds end game is played out on Discord, really sucks a lot of the potential life out of the game.
The true end game is the forums.
Just because you played like an angel, doesn’t mean everybody did.
I can also talk about crime existing without being an actual criminal, stop putting both in the same bag.
Getting pvp’d was quite punishing in a lot of mmorpgs between 2000-2010 and there was always something to gain for the people doing it. The punishment for PvP’ing innocent people and then getting pvp’d yourself was just MASSIVE. In some games you could lose months of progress by doing this.
That was also the reason people played WITH each other and “respected” each other since the potential punishments were so harsh.
You’ve some rose colored glasses on. How people play games has inherently changed.
People will drop into any game with a set plan how to optimise anything, what’s the best gear/strategy/playstyle. Being “good” is for many the new fun now like it or not.
And when there is 0 reward for being good, people just drop off after awhile.
I can’t even grasp how that idea is so far from understandable to you.
If you enjoy NW’s pvp and want nothing for it, then that’s good for you man.
Most games tho give you sth for put in time.
You could argue even pvp in League or Valorant or CS gives you a opportunity to raise your skill(in normals) and thus you can “gain” higher elo.
There’s always something to gain in any game.
FFXIV’s pvp isn’t great, noone really cares about the ranking.
BUT they give you great rewards/skins/titles and a MASSIVE daily xp boost JUST so people participate, well it’s also quite fun in it’s own way. While I’d argue NW’s pvp just got frustrating for everybody (I’ve around 600h in NW’s pvp).
And this is why I can find a 72people lobby to play with at 2am within 5 minutes in an mmorpg where people don’t even care about it’s pvp.
Now compare that to OPR on like 80% of the servers
I played EQ2 PVP (EU server and then Nagafen when the EU server started dying). It was a blast back when it first started. The thing about it though, it had a solid PVP rewards system where you could get nice BIS items specifically for PVP and it was team vs team (evil vs good), so you always had a reason to fight even though it had zero objectives for PVP. It also had the level range system, which was a bit gamey but still worked nicely enough to protect lower levels.
The biggest difference for me, though, was that classes felt pretty balanced back then. Most important of all… tanks could actually be tanks in PVP (taunts actually worked versus players). That was game changing for us. Our tank played a guardian and his sole job was taunting enemies onto him then using his hold the line skill to keep them locked onto him. It was glorious group PVP.
Even massive scale swarms of raids fighting raids was fun. And unless you had a scout for escape, it wasn’t so easy to just run away because the game locked you into combat which prevented run speed buffs (and the game had no gap closers either) and stopped healing unless you had a healer. And that meant you died. Which was also glorious.
Finally, you didn’t have camps to respawn at. You could only respawn at the set locations around the map and those locations were limited. A target you killed stayed dead for quite some time if you were fighting away from those locations. Almost no zerging. Of course, your healer could revive you if you had time. And that just added to the strategy.
New world has… almost none of this. The only time you legitimately find open world PVP is during influence pushes and they usually end up as messy spawn zergs with little to no actual PVP. Just a mess of stunlock and spike damage or endless fights that involve the usual escape-based classes that just run forever.
As there are no PVP servers, you don’t get the same feeling when you venture out as a flagged player. You get some of the thrill of it but that soon wanes when you realise very few others flag at all. And I don’t mind that. I thought the flag system was a great way to handle PVP in a PVE game. But it’s just not the same as a full flagged server.
It’s one reason why so many keep asking AGS to release PVP servers.
You make some good points and your post has got me pretty nostalgic. I better go apologise to the other guy.
I was on the RP-PVP server (Venekor) then got transferred to Naggy when they consolidated servers.
My time on Venekor was/is hands down the best gaming experience of my life. The game was awesome up until EoF - when it started its decline imho.