My experience with PvP was a love/hate relationship, which started with love, ended with hate, and went back and forth several times in between. I was probably one of the first to try PvP, playing it extensively on the test server before it ever went live. It was incredible. Tons of people, the ability to join a match literally any time you wanted, it was perfect. Lots of stuff was unbalanced, but it was fun. Zero trash talk, just fighting against actual people instead of a computer. I still remember the first time I spawned into a PvP match....and how I Total Focused the guy....and how incredible it was
I respecced all my toons in anticipation of PvP going live...
So it goes live on my Freedom sever, the most active server of all, and I go to the arena expecting to kick some ass.....and it's completely empty. So I check back 5 minutes later, 30 minutes later, half a day later......it's empty. I check it again and again for about a week, but it's basically impossible to find a match, and if you do, it's 1v1, which is 100% unbalanced. Damn it, I just respecced all my toons!!! So I respec all of them back to PvE.
Then the next day a friend I met on the test server asks me to join the PvP SG that's being formed...the first real PvP team in the game...the one that goes down in PvP lore as arguably the best team of all time, the only team that never loses a single match to anybody. I politely decline, because damn it, I just wasted 2 respecs on all my toons, and I don't even have any more on some toons! In hindsight, this was a mistake
A while later I get back into PvP when PvP zones go live, and it's fun. Zones are full all the time, you can easily get teams, and I become well known, especially in Siren's Call, where most of the action is. Arena is still completely dead on Freedom, so I avoid it. Then one day I get a random invite into a random PvE SG, and I randomly accept. Shortly afterward they start a PvP team, and I end up being the main blaster, because I'm one of like 3 people that has any PvP experience. The SG has a very relaxed atmosphere, where if you want to play, you get to play, even if you aren't good. We lose a lot, because we go up against teams that take this very seriously. But we realize that this is CoH, a game that's purposefully designed to prohibit serious PvP competition, so it's ok and long as people are having fun. I'm the top player in every match, even though we often lose, and it does get annoying sometimes, but hey, it's CoH PvP, a game where everything is decided by a random number generator. I still have fun.
Our players eventually get better, and we pick up some new guys, and we become a serious contender. But still, if someone that's clearly not in the starting lineup wants to play, he gets to play. Because that's what the SG is about. So we still lose quite a bit. I'm still the #1 blaster, but we have two new guys that are very clear #2 and #3.
Then I go on a trip to Europe for a couple weeks, and I come back to learn that I'm no longer the #1 blaster. I was replaced by the new guys, and I have to "prove" that I deserve to be #1. I get the sense that things are changing. The atmosphere seems different. All the mandatory team practices are just too much, and they usually consist of the starting lineup dominating whoever else happens to show up, which serves nobody any good. I start caring less and less, and a short while later quit arena PvP. My team eventually goes on to become the undisputed #1 team in CoH, but it's not really my team. Literally zero of the original players remain - they were replaced by a new group of young kids that had been kicked out of their previous two SG's for being immature brats. But yeah, the team becomes #1. The whole SG even gets special badges on the CoH forums, and I'm eligible for one, but I decline. The SG is a shell of itself. Instead of a group of close friends, it's a handful of arena PvP players that consider CoH PvP their calling in life...and some other people that nobody cares about. Lots of people quit the SG, some quit the game altogether, and it's really a completely different group of people from when I joined. "We" are #1 for a bit, and then we're overtaken by some other team, and then the cycle continues several times while PvP dies a slow death.
I go on to play zone PvP for a long time, but it becomes less and less popular after Issue 13, and eventually I quit PvP altogether and ride off into the sunset after over a year of PvE-only gameplay, where I don't miss PvP one bit. But looking back, I have to admit that some of my most fun memories in this game happened in PvP.
The moral of the story is...yes, you can win with a win-at-all-costs attitude...but at what cost? If you're playing in the Superbowl, yeah it's probably worth it. But in CoH PvP? I'm not so sure.