I love playing PvP since it can provide me a temporary relief from the regular PvE, questing, grinding and raiding. Also, the game play will be more interesting as different players will have different play styles. Sometimes, I can make new friends and they may provide suggestions to improve my play style making me improve as a player whether I win or lose. However, it is irritating whenever there are whiners who get sore about losing, blaming it on the imbalance, equipment and condition(off form or whatsoever). They call you a noob. For victors, they insult you for being loser, sometimes when they outclass you in terms of skills despite them having lousier equipment, they may brag about their skills.

For me, I would like to see PvP with more variety to make it more interesting. This can be done through settings. For example, disabling potions or ultimate skills and the space of the battle arena. The arena can be extremely small with little rooms for maneuvering around or a large areas where it becomes a 'cat chasing mouse' secenerio. Also, you can play 2v2, 3v3 and so on which tests not only the individual skill but also how the team cooperate with each other.

Sometimes, PvP may be a ground for grieving due to the disparity in raw stats as I have mentioned above. I think what can be done about that is to create two different modes, one being the normal PvP where the stats and skill matter and the balanced PvP where everyone is scaled down to a certain stats so it just requires skill. This way, the casual players can have fun playing on equal grounds while the hardcore players can grind and grind for better equipments and improve their skills to surpass other players.

Seems to me that there's an awful lot of gear-bashing going on here. These complaints about how fights ought to have pre-set gear to 'level the playing field' is a bit like taking away any classes special powers, or only lettings fights occur on flat terrain with no obstacles. Gearless combat isn't 'pure skill' because choosing and acquiring gear is its own skill. It should go without saying that special gear that is purchased or something like that isn't quite the same, but if everyone has the same capacity to acquire the gear, there's no reason to bash gear in terms of skill level. If you want to run naked into battle, that's your own choice. It doesn't mean the other person isn't fighting fair for having better armor. Appropriate balancing of gear is essential, but balanced does not mean having no advantages.

However, back to the topic, PVP is only marginally more satisfying to me merely from a challenge standpoint. Against other people, you're roughly on the same level, combat becomes a challenge. Usually, PVE is designed so that the player can win. Maybe not easily, but losing isn't often what games are designed to make us do. This is why PVP tends to be more thrilling, there's a challenge, a risk of losing and more often than not, you lose because you get beat, not just because you did something stupid.

PVP needs to be carefully designed though. I absolutely hate games with unexpected gameplay in that regard. Call of Duty is notorious for this. I expect some sort of military simulator and I get people sprinting around with overpowered shotguns and bladewitches. Win or lose, CoD never feels very satisfying because it's too jarring, I have to spend my time playing an entirely different game countering what I consider to be abuses of bugs. The combat experience of a game ought to feel like it fits with the rest of the experience. Halo is a little better at this. Still some weird, obnoxious tactics, but they fit more into the tone of the game. You're a super soldier, of course you could just jump onto the jet and hijack it. However, none of this is exclusive to PVP, a carefully balanced PVE experience, where enemies pose a real challenge can be equally satisfying, even if you can't abuse psychology to do so.

Personally, I prefer immersive environments. PVE is almost always immersive because the game gets total control over everything and I'm in the mindset of being there. PVP is almost never immersive because people care less about playing a game and more about flat out winning. This is where abuse of bugs and so forth comes in because they don't care if they're being a dumbass, they won. PVP is only preferable to me when it's light-hearted, pointless competition. If players don't care about the outcome, then it becomes more enjoyable because there's less... manhandling the engine to do odd, unexpected things, which I personally find to be the biggest killer among PVP experiences. However, a robust engine might be able to prevent that.

@greatak, i'm curious, what kind of game-play do you consider to be abuse of bugs ?
(i m assuming the games you play aren't full of real bugs)

Like I said, I consider things like bladewitches out of Call of Duty to be abuse of bugs. Especially in the case where a lot of them were using an actual bug when the care package thing let you run much faster. Or the fairly common FPS oversight to make shotguns perform like overpowered rifles. I'm using bug in a more generalized sense though of 'unexpected gameplay' rather than just the narrow game-breaking interpretation. I'm just personally strongly opposed to gimicky games where the experience feels, well, stupid. It's much more fun, in my opinion, when things happen differently every time rather than spamming the same trick over and over. Many RTS's are also guilty of these sorts of design oversights, where one or two factions have a vastly superior rush strategy that turns every game into the exact same rush, over and over. Such things make PVP into a boring experience, with all the same problems as AI enemies doing repetitive things.