Zog'orium
Grandmaster
Some good ideas here.
One thing though, everybody is talking about "incentives" and that doesn't really seem to work.
There have been multiple incentives to encourage people to practice PvP and it appears that some people (blue PvMers) do not want to even give it a try, it's just not their thing. Or they just give it a try, get wrecked and give up.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, everybody can play as they wish to play in a sandbox MMO, I just want to point out that "incentives" rarely work because you can't force people to do something they don't like/are not good at, especially in a video game. Period.
Plus, incentives are usually getting abused (amers in factions = what a fucking joke).
Even though I agree with end game content = higher risk at getting raided, keep in mind that almost nobody here is a teenager with endless hours of gameplay anymore, we're probably all in our 30s with a job and a family and when you're doing one or two champs a week and it gets raided by the same griefing zerg everytime, people just say "fuck it" and quit.
I've seen several guildies leave UOF for that very reason.
You can call them QQ noobs or pussies or bad players, but it's in the interest of the shard that people keep playing/donating so surely there can be some adjustments that don't imply trammelyzing champs or totally nerfing reds. But it's just not right that a guild works a champ for 30 minutes (or more than 2 hours if we're talking sea champ, cause nobody uses a boat) and a zerg can shit all over it AND get all the rewards.
If screaming "people need to organize themselves and defend their champs" was the solution, the problem would have been solved by now.
I do agree that SOME incentives would benefit the shard and a proper bounty hunter system would probably help. I really liked Dewderonomy's suggestions: make it worth something and it may or may not work out but at least you created the incentive and conditions to incite players to hunt for reds and defend themselves as a group.
I don't think there is any incentive that will make pvmers turn into pvpers. What I thought was maybe we are approaching this from the wrong angle. Give some incentive to pvpers to help defend spawns rather than just raid them in numbers near the end.