In order for PVP to blossom again and have old players return, old system mechanics must return and be embraced and rewarded for the actions the individual pvp player does.
Combo Cancelling was one of the main features of the game that set Age of Conan apart from other games, a feature that was removed and scared away 90% of the dominate pvp players. Now I know, a vast majority of people left in this game are going to sit here and try to elaborate to me how it's an exploit, but these are the very same people that can't do it and will claim they can and how easy it is, yet not a single one of them ever played premades or dominated in any world pvp during the time of combo cancelling or even now.
If PVE servers are surviving and all the pvp servers are dead, then that would only lead to one conclusion, the people left playing now do not PVP and truly don't want to, but they will always be here to stick their nose in business that really isn't any of their interest or concern, but like any product we pay for, every person has an opinion and this is mine.
Combo Cancelling functions much like the reload timer bar in the game Gears of War. In Gears of War, when firing your machine gun, you obviously have to reload. When you do reload, there is a bar that is presented with 3 divided sections and a sliding timer bar that scrolls over these 3 sections giving you a small advantage if properly timed right to get a damage boost and a fast animation to reload. The first section on the bar is the "error" section, which if you time yourself to early, your gun jams and you get a very slow animation which displays the character hitting his gun like it's jammed and you get zero damage boost. The 2nd section of the bar displays a small portion that if time right, allows you to get the damage boost and fast reload time. If you miss the 2nd section of the bar, which is the area you always want to time correctly, it skips in to the 3rd portion of the bar, which reloads normally with no damage boost.
So as you can see, Combo cancelling functions exactly like this for each individual combo step players execute on their class. Even though it was not intentional, it was an exploit that was beneficial to the game, which as I said above, should be embraced, not rejected. The better players under pressure were able to do this with every single combo and versus other amazing players, it created such a fast paced tempo and added another dynamic layer to the duel, battle which equated to a higher skill curve.
Another section that once was in Age of Conan that was amazing for PVP was being able to use the same Crowd Control Combo at a different level for different PVP scenarios, let me explain. For the Bear Shaman, if you wanted to use your Knock Back combo that was an instant cast at the time, you would initiate it and it would do an animation depending on the level of combo it was. So say it was Shrewd Blow IV, this would give you a longer animation and have different variant effects on the type of armor the person was wearing. At level IV it was a longer animation, but you could knock back heavy armor targets, but at level II, the animation was slower and would only knock back Medium Armor targets and under. People use to bind different levels to act on a pvp situation quicker depending on what they were fighting, another dynamic layer in the game which has now been removed.
Crowd Control Cast Bars, this one was probably the most annoying of the 3 for me, all which made me leave the game along with my entire guild Carnage, who everyone knows dominated PVP in the NA scene.
After the CC's got tampered with over time, it had become obvious that the game was becoming watered down to the point that anybody could compete at the game as long as they had AA and Gear, that was the goal of the previous AoC development team, to casual-ify the game for your everyday gamer, which clearly didn't work in a niche market type game.
Being an Assassin in the game, you relied on being quick, precise mobile. With the last changes on CC's, they destroyed any type of swift skillful combat the game had to offer. Who wants to stand still and cast a crowd control ability while in PVP? I mean really? Do you truly think that people wanted to stop in a stand still animation and just look at another target in PVP and watch their cast bar move as they wait for it to CC somebody? Every single CC in the game was altered to this or some type of combo step, making for extremely boring and dull game play. There is a reason why they call twitch.tv "twitch" because that's another factor in gaming, reaction speed is huge in pvp, without it, you're removing a functionality one person may be greater at then another.
You may not agree with what I have to say, but that's fine, but you should just remember, Silirrion never agreed either and it's clearly obvious where the game is now. Casual gaming isn't the only way to make money, look at League of Legends, SC2, Counter-Strike, DayZ, all player versus player games that rely on skill, teamwork and reaction speed, if SC2 was watered down, it would just be another crappy RTS that had come and gone by now.
I don't expect AoC to ever make a serious come back, but if you were to try and do something, changing the above things I mentioned above back to there original state or close to it and adding in new features such as Arena's with actual rankings and real rewards and competition could truly help the game out.
Another concept you could try to help the PVP section of the game is, completely remove gear in mini games, open a sub-website that has Free 2 Play for PVP only and allows for players to sign up for Mini games using any character they want and making teams for competition and jumping in to any mini game that is available to the game. Pvp players DO NOT WANT TO GRIND, We just want to play for the mind game. It's like telling a poker player he has to grind to level 90 before he play a game of poker, we don't want to do that.
But if you could find a way to allow us to only pvp only in mini games and no other aspect of the game, I truly think this would do extremely well, especially since it's F2P using micro transactions and advertisement on the loading screen in.