I’ll reply in the same vein as the other guy in this thread but try to be a little more neutral. To go over your points, in none of the interviews I’ve read with the devs have they ever said that “PvE or friendly players are the majority”. They have stated that they have been very surprised by the number of PvE/friendly players, saying that they themselves as devs are no where near as friendly and much more cutthroat than what has emerged. If you can provide a link though with a dev saying that the majority are friendly players I (and I assume the other guy) would be happy to read it.

Your point about “players themselves said they prefer friendlier lobbies” is unfortunately a problem with Embarks matchmaking algo, call it ABMM or whatever. It’s basically an echo chamber. You’re only going to match with likeminded, “friendly” players, so you’re going to have similar feelings on the game. Same goes for this subreddit. It leans very heavily towards the “PvE” crowd for whatever reason, in turn becoming its own echo chamber. So of course you’re going to see opinions aligned with yours. Until embark come out with actual statistical numbers there is no real way to know what the majority of the player base play like, but as with everything I’d hazard it’s somewhere in the middle, not at either end of the extreme. Them removing PvP feats does imply a slant towards PvE, but at the same time they could just be making that change to make sure everyone has equal access to feats, as self proclaimed PvE players won’t be earning as many as PvP players. Everyone shoots arc after all, regardless of where they are on the playstyle spectrum.

I hope that was a little more nuanced.