The Feast

[Zojha]

I mean, maybe. People don't always do the worst thing you expect of them.

People will maximize their rewards and if intentionally losing and win-trading via PF is the best way to do that, people will do that. It's just how it works when you try to bribe people into content they don't wanna do in the first place, they will attempt to get the rewards with as little effort and time spent doing that content as possible. And once they have the rewards, they'll be off, again, because they were never interested in that content in the first place. Moreover, the reward needs to be within the tolerance threshold of players - nobody cares about Savage despite its rewards simply because it's too much effort.
This is how controlling behaviour with rewards works and why I'm getting increasingly frustrated when people have no better ideas than "slap some rewards on it" for any sort of dead content. If we apply the same logic to 1.0, all SE would have had to do is to pay players for playing, rather than remaking the game to be something people are willing to pay for themselves.
Did you know 8vs8 "and" 4vs4 of the feast had very swift queues when they first came out? I remember waiting no more than 5 minutes. People didn't stick, 8vs8 is dead. Why? Refer to the above. It's not fun and people got their pup/marks.

Worse, you're destroying intrinsic motivation in the process, which is the thing you actually want to foster. Go to google scholar and search for some intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic rewards studies for reference, a few should be freely available.

I totally agree with you that increasing popularity is the top priority. I just think this needs to go the way of gameplay changes, rather than rewards. We don't need more people to "do" PvP, we need more people to "enjoy" PvP - participation will come on its own as a consequence.