I'm a fan of having a PVE option. I won't be buying the game without one (and neither will the rest of my family)
There is nothing the game gives you that is more incentive to attack other players than the sheer satisfaction of killing other players. No amount of in-game tweaking to make it "less appealing" is going to stem the tide (which will grow now that your Beta is not exclusive) of players who get their kicks from making the game a frustrating ordeal for exploring, map-reading treasure hunting fun seekers.
And to all those who say "do scouting, be careful, have a lookout", sure. That's fine. How many hours would you like me to spend skirting the island I'm looking for, leaving, circling, coming back, fleeing, being chased and then wondering if the hand-in island is going to be the same annoying timesink?
I've iterated and reiterated why countless times in my thread, so I'm simply going to re-paste the "why not" bit here because it's the only question I'm not getting a response to (and I think we can all see why).
I've been waiting years for the release of what looked really promising at E3. I'm not going to play it now, and neither will (obviously a fair number of) like minded people. It's not a monumental jump from what they have already to give a PVE option, so why can't I point out that they'll get a wider audience if they do?
And why does everyone care so much? Either the PVE players will not play, or they'll get their own servers and play there (and spend money on the game so the devs have more incentive to add more features, which benefits everyone). The ONLY reason I can see is that existing players are concerned that this will somehow depopulate the PVP - and that anyone left in PVP will be people who WANT to play PVP. The only conceivable reason for this "no, you're enjoying it wrong" argument is that you WANT there to be people in the PVP arena that don't want to be there.