On PvE vs PvP players
Sadly there will not be a grand unified game that everyone likes. Even games that are successful in one region, can fail in another (e.g. a successful NA game can fail in the Asian market, or vice versa). Although a region is a large sample size, and people are still people, something like changes in culture by region can affect whether it appeals to a group of people.
Game studios ultimately need to choose what kind of game systems they want to create, which in turn determines what kind of players it appeals to. Unfortunately, the current MMORPG player population is the most divided community in gaming, because many of its players either like one of two fundamentally opposite ideas: They either like PvP, or they don't like PvP. There's a sizeable portion of the latter that are allergic to any form of PvP, which is caused by their own insecurities about their abilities. And there's a sizeable portion of players in the other category that don't want to play a massively multiplayer game that relegates PvP to instanced battleground minigames, or takes away from open world PvP by letting players opt out of it. Letting players opt out of open world PvP might as well let them opt out of the open world altogether. Trying to appeal to both groups fragments the game, and is directly opposed to the massively multiplayer aspect of MMORPGs.
All of this has led to the sad state of affairs of the MMORPG genre. Game dev studios receive feedback that some of its players don't like PvP, so they let players opt out, or put more content in instances. This is obviously a problem, because instances and opting out directly goes against the idea of massively multiplayer games. PvE-only players inevitably drive games towards a less massively multiplayer experience, which, along with the P2W exploitation in PvP or PvX MMORPGS, explains the current state of affairs.
Therefore, if someone says "I hate PvP, and will avoid it at all costs", then I do not want them to influence the game, because they are diametrically opposed to the core values and game systems of AoC. Do we then need to worry about not enough people liking the game? No, because if we look at the general population of people who play games, you'll see that the number of active players playing PvP games far exceeds that of PvE games. Taking half-measures to appeal to both doesn't work, because these are fundamentally opposing ideas, and would result in cheapening the massively multiplayer aspect of the game.
