The problem with making PvP a big deal in this game is that... all the Grand Companies are friends and everyone eventually become friends. You also can't align with anyone who isn't a friend in the first place - just the starting 3 Grand Companies.

The PvP lore in this game started out as literally playfighting over a piece land with historical significance. You are just incapacitating eachother like it's an airsoft game. It amounts to just organized military exercises and training.

It could still come across as organized military training if it were in specific areas, maybe.

But SE doesn't do much in the open world because they seem to like controlling the amount of players so that there aren't too few and there aren't too many, which instanced PvP achieves.

An example of what can happen if you don't control the amount of players is hunt trains and how the amount of people can obliterate the hunts in an unintended way.