PVP is S***ty game design.

Take two people, give them the same abilities, and say whoever kills the other one's base/hero/ancient is the winner.
What's that, you say? With the same abilities it's just a 50/50 game of chance? Okay, add levels and gear, whoever plays more (pays more...) is better and wins more often (always).
Nobody would play your S***ty game, though . . . Unless you slap $1,000,000 worth of art on top of it, advertise the S*** out of it, pay/beg popular YouTubers to play it and go all-in on micro transactions and just ride the wave until your product lifecycle reaches the "Jump the shark" stage.
In which case you must release a "zombies" mod.
Meanwhile, millions of people enjoy solitaire, candy crush, bejeweled and other simple games that more closely resemble doable, feasible tasks encountered in life.
The entire PVP/arena world is dominated by people who are losers in life, it seems, who enjoy knocking other people down a peg to bring themselves up. People who would cut off a mini van with a family driving in it, just to get to Redbox faster. People who freeze when confronted in real life, but have no problem trash talking over the internets.
PVP is not game design. It's giving two people a hammer and letting them hit each other with it, and selling them helmets and bigger hammers.
F***ing losers.

 

Man, you're just on a real rampage recently.

Maybe just take a break?

 

You got killed in one of them recently, didn't you?

 

Yeah... time for some yoga, man.

As a counterpoint, my 12-year-old has been playing a lot of Splatoon online (4 vs 4 team PvP), and loving it. Sometimes he splatters, sometimes he gets splattered, but he always has fun.

So, to steer this into a more productive discussion: what is it that makes some PvP games fun, while others are soul-sucking newbie-bashing experiences as @Master-Frog describes?