As much as I too, would like to see all of these things you mentioned, I'm pretty confident none of it will be in at release. PvP wise, all I've gotten wind of at release is the arena - multiple maps, which may or may not involve guilds challenging guilds, and the mines, which I'm not sure if it is instanced or not instanced, but is an FFA PvP zone somewhere underneath a city where valuable crafting materials can be extracted.

There was mention of shard conquest too, where guilds will battle guilds over control of their own shard, but I thought I read somewhere that it wasn't going to be ready at release.

the game seems to be lacking in PVP content. AOC and WAR look like they will be much better for that.

Originally posted by ravenglade
I doubt there will be mass battles past 40 vs 40 (a guess).  I base this hypothosis on the following fact:
 
This game uses an instancing system that copies an area when there are too many people in it. This is to ensure minimal lag in combat. I believe that with the combat system that is implimented, it was essential to do this to ensure smooth gameplay. So that would mean squeezing 200+ people into the same area will not happen in this game.

Originally posted by Delanor

Originally posted by ravenglade
I doubt there will be mass battles past 40 vs 40 (a guess).  I base this hypothosis on the following fact:
 
This game uses an instancing system that copies an area when there are too many people in it. This is to ensure minimal lag in combat. I believe that with the combat system that is implimented, it was essential to do this to ensure smooth gameplay. So that would mean squeezing 200+ people into the same area will not happen in this game.

They have indicated that they are still working things out. They have not given specific numbers, but have hinted at much higher numbers in an instance than you are talking about. How shard conquest will go is also uncertain at the moment, but they did scale it down from High House level to Guild level, which means that combat at an epic scale will perhaps not occur. But not for the reason given in the above. As I understood it, but don't take my word for it (as they told us not to take their word for it), the amount of people will be in the order of hundreds, if not thousands. But these numbers are for normal shards. Nothing is know about shards involved in shard conquest yet. In other words: we don't know, and maybe they don't either.

They will have Shard Conquests after release.

Shard Conquests are pretty similar to what you described, but not on the same scale. Having hundreds of players in one battle would be a lag-fest for everyone.

The idea between Shard Conquests is this: A new land is discovered and the Houses (or maybe guilds instead) will fight for control of them. There would be a definite winner as well (rather than a 'never-ending' WoW-style battle), who would then have control of the new land... at least for a while.