And, to that point, I’m not even asking for ‘hard evidence’ in terms of data that we cannot possibly collect.
I spent a few hours today trying to better understand this. I went so far as to create characters on some of the more extremely imbalanced servers, and walk to areas (my first time gaining levels solely from exploration, btw) die a lot, and make my way to ports, and places where I could observe PVP happening.
I also chatted with a few people engaged in the PVP, and tried to get a sense of what the general feeling was on the servers.
Stalagg, which is one of the apparently worst balanced server now, has a somewhat hopeful feel, from what I gathered.
I do see this, actually. Unfortunately, the more I look into it, the more I feel that it really is just people who made a mistake and selected PVP when what they really wanted was PVE.