Bob Dole has been thinking about why at the start of a world there is more than 1k players on for a long period of time, and why it drops off.
He knows the reason but it's more nuanced than people just getting tired of the quality grind.
He wonders what haven would be like if it weren't a niche game with 150-200 players/alts on at once, and what things would personally keep him coming back.
Haven has one of the best combat systems out of any game, but many players don't know how to fight other players. That's a problem, even if Jorbtar doesn't see it as one. Everyone knowing how to fight also helps balance pvp, as they are constantly pushing the meta to the brink.
Instead of real pvp just being life and death, or a mock battle in valhalla that most players just avoid due to no incentives, what if there was some change to that? For example, what about some kind of tournament every 7 days that awards the winner a hat. It would be 1v1 or 3v3 duels in an instanced tinier valhalla.
This kind of thing would serve many functions, for one, it would teach people to fight, and it would retain more of the hardcore pvpers as they would always have something to look forward to.
The real purpose of this wouldn't be having a tournament, but the psychological factor of making someone log in. Simply having a player log in gives a chance to get him hooked onto the game again and play.(In Bob Doles opinion, haven doesn't have something like this right now, and a weekly tournament on an equal footing where stats and botting doesn't give you an edge would do that(at least for Bob Dole)
You might be asking how this would work as the fighters could just run endlessly, and the fight would never end, but there are also ways to prevent unlimited chasing with no resolution like in real world pvp. Every minute you are in combat, the combatants will gain 1% movement speed when chasing. Similar to how you gain a movement speed buff when chasing critters.
Then at the end of 20 minutes, the fighter(s) with the most percentage health remaining wins.
This could also be a way to test possible combat implementations without it touching the real game, and see it's effects directly.