I dont want to put up with the silly griefing / gankfest in 2 days when amazon finally ships me my copy. I do like the thought of participating in siege combat and helping a guild get control of a town for crafting benefits.

Anyway, are those things limited to PvP servers only ? I like PvP, just not the way Funcom has it implemented. Getting slaughtered while waiting for my screen to load and then graveyard camped isnt my idea of fun

I believe that siege warfare and city building will be in all variations of the servers.

If you don't want to deal with the random PVP gankfest, I suggest you roll on a PVE server.

well I had hoped that the RP-PvP server would be less gank-friendly but from what Im reading its worse. I like the idea of FFA but at least make our avatars not attackable for 1 min when loading into a new zone.

The Devs were damn fools not to include some sort of Player Killing restriction, like looting or especially a "Murderer/Red" Penalty system like what UO had. This made Open FFA equally tame and dangerous. AoC's PvP might as well be the same as WoW's PvP with every single player being their own faction. There is a big difference.

With that being said, I would really not worry about ganking being a big issue after a few weeks. Eventually players will learn to police themselves. Everyone will be interested in doing quests, gathering resources, and gaining levels for quite a while and so "Live and Let Live" will be the unofficial rule. In WoW you could always stick just to Horde or Alliance areas and only ventured into No Man's Land when you truely wanted to fight, or at least expected it. In AoC(On FFA PvP Servers) players will have no choice but to get along if they want to progress.

Maybe Funcom will come to their senses and put in a Red/PK Penalty System before players get high enough for them to turn to PvP as an endgame. They don't realize that FFA PvP fans want FFA PvP with risk and reward, especially now that MMORPGs have Arena PvP, otherwise it is something entirely different.

The PvE servers will have guild-owned keeps in the Border Kingdoms, the zones that are FFA PvP. They will also have PvP mini-games (battlegrounds from other games...) and sieging of the aforementioned keeps will be possible.

The only difference on a PvP server is that instead of going to specific zones to have FFA PvP, you do it everywhere.

So, you'd be able to PvP on both, it's just not as prevalent on a PvE server. It definitely sounds like you'd enjoy a PvE server most, but perhaps as new improvements are added to PvP servers or the first couple of weeks pass, ganking will be less common?