The problem will always exist so long as the PvE world exists. No matter what changes you make to PvE, unless it is straight up "unviable" as a leveling strategy, it is going to be used over PvP. Why? Because people just don't feel like dealing with interruptions to the ever so boring and ever so tiresoeme Herocraft leveling experience.
And what Kainzo, and probably many others, don't understand, is that PvE is what
drives the PvP of Herocraft, and always has. And that PvP is what drives a lot of the community aspects of Herocraft as a whole. Without a strong presence of PvP, there is very little reason for others to band together and become friends with other players.
========
Take for example this situation:
Player "Steven" is new to the server. He is a level 1 lost soul.
After a few hours, or perhaps a day or two, he manages to spec into a class that looks interesting to him.
He gets to level 15 or so, and has started to understand the tricks of leveling more quickly on HC.
OH SHIT! 360noscopeNerdKing just ganked the crap out of him and killed him in 2 seconds!
Well that sucks. He just
lost all of his items (
whoops sorry forgot HC wasn't hardcore anymore) and now he has to run all the way back to where he was before. Oh well, it happens.
OH SHIT! 360noscopeNerdKing has absolutely
no life what so ever. Ganked again!~~
Steven is now
very upset. He's considering quitting. Because he is 12 years old however, he must notify the world how he feels first.
/ch o
"Fucking no life bitch why don't you get a life"
Steven has been muted from [O] chat.
Steven is now
really really upset.
But wait! Good Samaritan X is swooping in.
----Here's where things can split. Either
A) Steven is whispered by some random PvPer that wants to kill 360noscopeNerdKing, and asks him where he is.
Steven replies, thanks the random PvPer, and feels much better about his situation. If he's lucky, the player that whispered him will stick around for a while and provide some extra protection.
B) SuperZergTownX (LO) Whispers Steven and invites him to their zerg nation, where all noobs are protected with a nice little blanket.
LO then rushes to the area and ganks 360noscopeNerdKing with 10 people.
----
Regardless of the outcome, Steven has now witnessed that 360noscopeNerdKing is not invulnerable, and he too wishes to some day be that strong. Maybe he joins a zerg town, maybe he makes his own town, or maybe he stays a lone wolf, but establishes connections to various PvPers through whispers.
===========
And that's just one notable example, I could come up with a hundred more. I've just seen this particular example so many times that I feel it is the one most worth mentioning.
Hell, it's how I fucking started on this server. I got ganked, I was pissed, I applied to a town, and learned the ropes from them. I was given a sense of wanting to become better at PvP, and that is what drove me to continue playing. I met a lot of different players, and eventually got invested enough to want to be a coder for the server.
The people that set it all in motion for me were
@RoflcerOfDaLawl,
@LafeD, and
@Xerot. I, along with
@Haunted9899, was ganked and robbed blind in our noob cave by these three players in Bastion. We were only level 15ish Rogues with barely any items. We were upset that it was so easy to be killed even though we thought we had chosen a good hiding place. Alas, we did not know of Track
(or entity radar *cough*) This is what motivated us to join Umbra, and what caused me to gain such an interest in the server. We wanted to feel safe while we PvE'd our way to the top.
If I never got ganked, I would have
never joined a town, and would have tried to create my own instead. If I did not become friends with the people in Umbra, I would have
never stayed on this server as long as I did. You can confer from this that the classes you are all playing right now simply
would not exist if I was not ganked as a noob.
This server
needs PvP, even if it isn't the main focus of the server, as Kainzo likes to state. The PvP is what drives players to act the way they do, and play the way they do. But the PvE must exist for the PvP to exist. If you let the PvP die off by allowing the PvE world to exist, you're letting the HC as we all know it to die with it.
Unfortunately, I know Kainzo, and I know he will never remove the PvE world. Nor will he remove "SoulBound" items. He will not make the PvE world unviable, and he will continue to state that the PvP is not the priority of the server. The server will move forward, and some changes will undoubtedly be made (Perhaps even the ones suggested in the OP of this thread) But it won't solve the problem, and the improvements will be minor.
Simply put...your fates are sealed.