The disappointment of a warring newbie.

Reading through this thread, however, I am a little bemused by the mindset that PvP has to be either a nasty, trolling, noob ganking free for all, or an activity that is only engaged in very seldomly with the mutual consent of both parties.  I totally agree that turning the game into a noob farming bullyfest would be an awful idea, and that maintaining the friendly, helpful atmosphere is important. But there are ways of setting up RTS games that let you have the best of both worlds.

For example, there is a game that I played for several years that is set up by dividing players into 2 different "factions."  Factions in the game I am talking about are really just two different teams that have the exact same stats, resources, etc.  The teams are completely equal in every game mechanic.  Which team you pick only affects which side of the map you belong to.  The map is divided up into 3 equal sections, with one team assigned to each of the outside ends, and a "warzone" section placed in between them.  PvP is always "on" everywhere, so anyone can attack you at any time, but the goal of PvP is to try and take over the ownership of the majority of the warzone. Players within each faction can fight amongst themselves, but they don't really do so.  For the most part, everyone works together to help out the newer alliances  and players within their own alliance build up, and saves their aggression for the warzone.  It is theoretically possible to attack the opposing faction within their homeland area, but players cannot even get into the enemy homeland unless they "own" a giant section of the warzone map all the way across it, and that almost never happens, so for the most part all PvP occurs within the warzone.  There is nothing that forces anyone to ever enter the warzone if they do not want to, and many players never do so, preferring to support other players on their side with troops and resources instead.  Noobs don't get farmed, because each team wants to build up the playerbase on their side of the map to have more people to help fight the other team, and you can't get to the other team's noobs in order to farm them.  Basically, you have two populations of players who act just like the people in illyriad currently do, helping new players grow and teaching them how to play, and all PvP occurs in a middle ground that you enter at your own risk.  Even in the rare instances where one faction or the other does break through the map, they get cut off from reinforcements extremely quickly by the losing side making a surge and taking a ton of the map back. And anyone who is running around attacking people on the enemy team in their homeland has to deal with TONS of players attacking them.  If they attack a noob, a bazillion vets will descend on them as soon as the noob complains in gen chat, which generally leads to the attacker being knocked back to the other side of the map where they belong.  The system lets players have both a stable environment to grow in, and a place to compete with each other once a player feels ready to enter the warzone.  You are never in danger of being annhilated (unless your dumb enough to send everything you ever made into the warzone), and if you lose to much you have a safe place to retreat to while you rebuild.  The game is mostly a cycle of building, going PvPing, then pulling back and rebuilding.  Anyone trolling on one side or the other will get wiped out by the combined faction for being annoying and harming the group dynamics of the faction. Chats for the two teams are kept separate, so you don't get a bunch of bashing on the other team going on either.  And actually the war is such an ongoing thing that people are competitive with each other, but not really nasty.  There were many chat groups set up in external applications such as palringo where the factions could converse with each other, and people would rib each other over victories they won that day, but it was really rather good natured in general.  Being to nasty would concentrate to many players focusing on you, and getting attacked by 100 people or more was not something most people wanted to provoke.  

Now, I am not trying to promote another game by telling you all of this.   The game I am talking about was FAR from perfect.  Most of it's issues stemmed from the developer having a back habit of selling things like hacks or troops to players in back door deals, though, and not from any problem that the game mechanics actually caused.  It had potential to be an awesome game, but the corruption that goes on in it makes it not one I would actually recommend playing. I'd actually advise against it. lol.

I am just saying that if you get creative with how you set PvP up, it doesn't have to be a ganking, trolling, camping, bullyfest.  There are ways of balancing everything so that you can have your cake and eat it to.  :)