Where is the PvP?

In all the discussion about Altdorf "fallen" (with everyone having a different definition of "fallen"), I failed to link to one of the most important blog posts on the subject: Saylah from Mystic Worlds asks the fundamental question about early morning raids of "Doesn’t that really just make it a PVE encounter at that point???"

Everyone says how Warhammer Online as a game is all about RvR / PvP, with players fighting other players. And then the endgame consists of first avoiding enemy players by attacking them when they sleep, and then a phase in which BY DESIGN the enemy players are locked out of their city, and the attackers play a big PvE raid public quest to kill NPC defenders and ultimately the king. So at best this is half-half PvP and PvE. And if you attack early enough it becomes 99% PvE. It's like playing WoW on a PvP server, where you might need to do a little PvP to get into the raid instance, but once you are in there, it's only PvE. So Emperor Karl Franz is still alive, and hasn't been beaten yet. But does that really matter if he is just a PvE raid boss? The attackers *did* finish the PvP part of the sequence to capture the enemy city. Anything after that only involves overcoming a completely arbitrary PvE boss fight.

So in the end WAR is a PvE game somehow involving the players of the other faction. But if people actually *wanted* to play PvP, they wouldn't plan early morning raids. Instead the attackers just want to win, and the easiest way to win is to PvE, not PvP. Makes you wonder if the game shouldn't be designed in a way that the fewer players are online, the stronger the NPC defences of the cities are, so attacking during prime time would actually be *easier* than attacking in the early morning.