I would like to see some incentives such as experience from killing players and loot. By loot I mean that a player has a loot table depending on their level range similar to how a mob would.
Bottom line anyone that is against or cant understand the purpose of incentives either has never played an MMO or is always in the first wave of quitters. Anyone can party up and get 100 kills a day when all they do is gank lowbies/solo players. Because of this KD means nothing alone. But when you have to have a certain KD to be able to wear certain gear or use PvP only abilities, now you have the basics for good PvP content.
I really hate ignorant generalizations. I especially hate ignorant generalizations wrapped in absurd hyperbole.
This is a video taken from an untagged character of two clans in Lineage 2 fighting for the rights to take on a high level raid boss called Frintezza. Frintezza drops some good gear beneficial to anyone who gets it and, by extension, their clan. Not to mention money and other valuable or useful items.
Dozens of players present from each Clan = Large Scale PvP
Right to Frintezza fight and its drops = "Incentive to PvP"
Winning the PvP, downing Frintezza and getting the drops which can be used, sold or disbursed to those present = "Reward"
THIS is what I, and I know there are others, want to see in TERA. Real, honest-to-goodness player-driven world PvP.
Note that at no point in these videos do you see those players out "getting 100 kills a day ganking lowbies/solo players". They are out PvP'ing against rival clans. These are only a sample of scenarios that could play out at any given time on any given day. They could last anywhere from a few minutes up to a few hours.
No real PvP'er or PvP clan/guild considers lowbie griefing/ganking to be real PvP. No real PvP clan or guild participates in such an activity. At *best*, they might drop a lower level player solely to use them as bait in order to provoke a larger PvP encounter with the rest of that person's clan/guild.
Serial lowbie griefers are an inevitable part of FFA PvP MMOs. But the only ones you'll ever see trying to justify what they do as "real PvP" are the serial griefers themselves, and they are a small minority of the overall game population.
Also, it's worth mentioning that when those videos were recorded, in L2 you would lose xp upon death. If you went chaotic and had 5+ PK's racked up, you could drop a piece of gear upon death. There was big risk of loss if you died. Yet, people PvP'd because, win or lose, they enjoyed it. So much for the claims by some that having a harsher death penalty would discourage people from PvP'ing eh?
There are myriad incentives to PvP in a player-driven setting. All people have to do is get their heads out of Skinner Box mode, stop relying on the game to define what they PvP for, use their imaginations, and recognize or create their own incentives and opportunities for PvP. That's what player-driven PvP is all about.
Have battle arenas or e-sport style events in TERA as a side activity. Sure. Absolutely. Award ranks for what players are the top on the server in a given category for those events. Great. But keep the rewards and status gained in BGs completely separate from world PvP. Do not let the rewards of an instanced arena PvP match have an effect on the outcome of world PvP. The two should be kept separate.