EDIT: Updated the OP title to reflect the true argument here. People were getting too confused on the original title. You have 3 types of multiplayer games types: PvE games that force full cooperation and have no element of PvP. Game objectives are designed to promote and most times, hard enforce full cooperation. Lack of cooperation leads to failure. (Example: Lethal Company) PvP games that are designed up for PvP, systems are fully designed to promote player to player conflict. This may be team based, independent battle royale, free for alls, or objective based. Balancing is frequent and often heavy handed. (Example: CoD) PvP games with PvE objectives. This is what most PvPvE (also known as PVA) games boil into. The focal point is centered around player conflict, but there are PvE mobs, obstacles, and objectives. (Example: Hunt Shodown, Sea of Thieves, RUST, Ark, EVE Online) While you can have PvP games with PvE objectives you can never balance the weight of PvP when adding it to a PvE game. The second you add PvP to a game, it becomes the dominating gameplay factor. Players do not even need rewards or objectives to prioritize killing each other because our human competitive monkey brain overwhelms everything else once you add the ability to attack other players. Anywhere there is PvP, players will find some way to force every area and event that has it to become a competitive battleground. Games that have even a small PvP element but are generally not designed for PvP will fare pretty badly (Star Citizen is in this position, SoO was an example). Edit: A profound statement by another spectrum user MordusRolland was: "PVP is like dye, a drop of it changes everything." If you add PvP to any game that does not have game systems to facilitate PvP, you get a horrible imbalanced trolly experience. This happens for the following reason: A mostly PvE game with a small amount of PvP elements -and/or a game that allows free player conflict, but does not have PvP control systems (opposing spawns, factional warfare, proper balance of weapons and abilities...) leads to a situation where instead of even-ground PvP conflicts occurring, players instead have a predator to prey relationships. What happens is now is one player or group waits for another to enter a PvE engagement situation where they cannot retaliate then launches their attack. Most encounters are one-sided and "ganking" becomes the dominant PvP. Edit: I am defining ganking here because people are having problems with it: "Engaging and killing another player under cowardly/unfair conditions in which the player has no options to defend or retaliate. The situation that the ganker chooses is generally unavoidable and the ganker is usually protected by badly designed game systems that are heavily favoring their behavior." This excludes conditions where players are put in bad situations because their own lack of preparation. An example being a cargo freighter captain who does not hire escorts and gets pirated, this is not ganking but legitimate PvP. Someone camping the orison shuttle with a grenade launcher and giving other players no options other than to sit there and die (because that is the only choked entry point to an area and players don't even have time to draw their gun to pose a threat due to armistice transition), this is ganking. Camping the hab spawns and killing naked players in Patch City, this is ganking. A game without factional warfare leads to betrayal situations where it is not possible to tell who is legitimately doing the PvE content and who isn't. Someone you think was on your team half of the PvE event can then just shoot you in the back of the head at any time and there is nothing you can do about it. Factional warfare solves this problem by forcing opposing spawns for each team and ensuring that players are properly flagged for their allegiances. This makes the intentions of each side clear and promotes fair conflict. There are some games that allow spying or masquerading as one side but they are heavily controlled and balanced (e.g. Spy from Team Fortress). Even if there is a tiny PvP element, the game is no longer PvE focused and never will be, because you have to plan and prepare for PvP conflict wherever you go. This just further enforces PvP being the dominant gameplay because winning the PvP encounter is the primary goal, everything else is secondary. Per the above the reason why Hunt Shodown works as a PvP game with PvE elements is because: Factional warfare is enforced. Teams are properly flagged for allegiance and players have dedicated opposing spawns. While there are PvE bosses and elements the game is mostly controlled by PvP rules. Weapons and abilities are balanced for player combat and teamplay is enforced on spawn to promote players covering each other while fighting PvE bosses. Hunt is mostly PvP focused and the PvE element is smaller in comparison, the game was designed with PvP first and PvE second. If you introduce a PvP element into the game and do not build the game from the ground up you get a lot of pretty serious issues: Ganking dominates PvP gameplay. Encounters are one sided and is only fun for one side, but extremely toxic for another. The game becomes niche. Solo play becomes impossible due to ganking and betrayal. You cannot do even simple events without someone to watch you back. This is a reality in Pyro (we experienced this in the playest) and it is fine to have some areas of the game designed this way but not all of it. Game systems to control PvP in a mostly PvE game become hard or impossible to implement. An example is CONCORD in EVE, which is an immortal police force that one shots players in high security space. But even with CONCORD a lot of ganking still happens in high sec because in most PvPvE game attempts, serious penalties from PvP controls systems are easily bypassed with alts. In EVE, players have gone great lengths to find work arounds to CONCORD and still gank players in starter zones because of the challenge of overcoming the system. The most difficult PvP protection systems begin to be seen by players as competitive walls to scale over so they can gloat about beating the system when they accomplish it (similar to how speed runners chase impossible scores in game). Now the system you created to control PvP just becomes another competitive challenge to hardcore gankers. Players will go to great lengths to surpass these systems, because they can and because they feel prestige if they do. Now the most serious problem: When you create a PvP game with PvE elements but do not have proper PvP balance or PvP control systems you get a cascading situation: Ganking and betrayels are dominant (we see this in SC with ganking being common, and betrayel acts like ship stealing being equally common). Allowing and even promoting this kind of gameplay attracts sociopaths to your game (example: RUST, Ark -which have similar problems as SC on unregulated servers). Those sociopaths see the game as a haven for their behavior and so they will bring more of their friends. Those players will form a community in your game and bring a high amount of toxicity to the game. They also will have a voice and will vehemently defend game designs that let them continue their sociopathic behavior (we see this pretty frequently on spectrum and on reddit by certain groups and personalities that are already universally hated by the general community). Obviously, this is highly destructive to the game community if allowed to continue and the antithesis of Chris Robert's goal of creating a game for everyone. You can never create a game for everyone, and you definitely should not create a game for sociopaths. CiG really needs to sit down and think about what they want SC to be. The current path is unsustainable. If this is going to be a PvP game with PvE elements (which is the current trajectory, because our 2 systems that we will be stuck with for a long time Stanton and Pyro are heavily PvP enabled), every single event and missions needs to start being designed with PvP in mind. This means factional warfare needs to be enforced and ship/fps/weapon balance needs to be focused around PvP. Factional spawn points need to be added. Players need reputation systems to flag their allegiances to either lawful or criminal groups to declare intentions sooner rather than later. This means events like SoO (which failed as a PvE event) need to be redesigned for these systems. An example of a redesign being that players that over gank and fail reputation with CDF and UEE common law need to be barred from entry to Orison and immediately killed by customs guards/AA defenses. The only way they can access SoO would be to align with the 9 tails by getting rep with them. The only way they would be able to access SoO would be through a 9 tails owned cargo barge that spawns outside of orison where they would board an NPC 9 tails cutlass that shuttles them to a designated LZ on SoO. These players would be forced to wear 9 tails armor so they are visually discernable and would not have allied triangles for CDF players. SoO becomes a PvP event with PvE elements. 9 tails players would need to be given objectives. These concepts need to be thought about and integrated into every mission and major event, such as Xenothreat. TDLR: You cannot just add PvP to a game without designing every same game system, element, mission, and event to fully support PvP situations. Failing to do this results in a a bad game.