Given that PvP wasn't part of CoH until issue 4, and was then restricted to the Arenas, and that the devs entered into an ongoing process of reworking the way powers worked (with the claim that "we won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons", which soon became "we'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons" and then disappeared completely as more and more changes were made to PvE abilities to fix balance issues in PvP -- remember movement suppression?), I think it's pretty clear that CoH was designed from the ground up as a PvE game -- and, in fact, one of the things that attracted me to it in the first place was that it didn't have PvP -- that had PvP plastered to the side as an afterthought.