I’ve been humming and hawing over if I should get this game.

My assumption was that people would play friendly or cooperate more in the early days, and then straight PVP would take over quickly. Is this the case?

The reason I assume this would happen is that there’s very little incentive to take the risk to cooperate when you could end up getting shot in the back and have your loot stolen.

The game sounds like if you were to try and min max, your best option would be to manipulate others to take advantage of any good will. Eventually, people would stop working together and just go straight to PVP as cooperative play would become too much of a risk or a waste of time.