Champions Online: Divided they Stand- PVP vs RP

There seems to be a great deal of hoo-hah around Champions online regarding the lack of segregation between Roleplayers and PVPers.

For those who don’t know, in the past when you start playing an MMO, you select a single server and make a character on it, who, under most circumstances, remains there and only there. This means devs have been able to set aside servers both for roleplayers, where non-RP dialog can even be punishable in some cases, or for hardcore PVP, often lifting some of the restrictions places on it in the normal servers, where enemies can be engaged on site without a dueling system to keep it consentual, so weak characters are not steamrolled by players of much higher levels.

Champions online works differently. Rather than picking a server, every time a player enters an area he can pick an “instance” of that area. This is good for eliminating the possibility people will find them unable to play with friends because they are on another server. It also fixes that recurring MMO issue of how many heroic adventurers/superheroes you find in a single place, diminishing how “special” being one seems.

But the resulting issue seems to be that RPers want to claim areas of the game as their own for roleplaying purposes, citing supposed cases of griefing by players engaging in PVP fights in locations such as the nightclub. PVPers, meanwhile, argue that this is a RPer landgrab, and that they have a right to dual as they wish and want to use these locals for their interesting layouts and such.

It seems to me the solution should be simple, have players flag themselves as being a PVPer or RPer and have the game sort them into instances together, so you have a PVP instance of heroes brawling around the bars and clubs of Millenium City, whilst in another instance you have anthropomorphic woodland creatures flirting with each other.

Further, an ignore list could go beyond hiding offenders text and let you ensure you never find yourself in the same servers as them. Only problem I see is the possibility that the list gets so long that you can’t get into any instance at all. But surely by that point you should be considering that maybe it’s you that has the problem?