Fel Atlantic is alive and well. Plenty of people to PvP with practically 24/7, if you know where to look. There are a lot of guilds which operate almost entirely in Fel. If a Trammie guild ever does a champ spawn, it's guaranteed to get raided. There are sometimes dozens of players competing over the spoils at an IDOC. Go wandering around with some uninsured items in your pack, and you won't have them for long; there are plenty of thieves and PKs around to relieve you of all your worldly goods. If you hang around as a ghost, you may even see some of them fighting over the stuff in your corpse. Try stealing a sigil at 3 AM and you'll see that Fel is alive and kicking. PvP on your shard may be dead, but that doesn't mean they all are. I do have a few ideas for making PvP a lot better on the less-populated shards, though.
I would like to see a consensual PvP system in trammel: Something like the old Roman Colisseum, where people could sign up to fight 1 on 1 and nobody would be allowed to interfere, but where spectators could bet gold on the outcome. Once the competitors entered the arena, it would be like an instance, where they couldn't leave until one was dead, and nobody else could enter and the arena would be an AOE free zone. The victor would get maybe 10% of the money that spectators bet; that would be a good non-item incentive to keep the fights honest. I can imagine having dozens of multi-million gold piece bets on the outcome of a fight between two really great PvPers.
Why arenas? A lot of people would like an alternative to either the pure PvM safety of Tram or the all-out, anything goes lawlessness of Fel. With an arena, players could PvP without being ganked, or any outside interference. A lot of Fel players would sign up for 1 on 1 duels; just watch the chat channel and you'll see all the challenges, then all the claims that somebody interfered on behalf of one or the other of the combatants, or the winner was killed by the loser's friends while he was still recovering from the battle. Two really great PvPers could have an all-out battle to the death without worrying about getting ganked if they win, or losing a lot of faction points if they lose.
Separating the Trammel and Felucca facets into separate shards wouldn't work. I like the safety of going home to Malas without getting ganked at my front door. When I want to PvP, I go to Felucca. When I want to PvM I have a huge choice of dungeons and monster spawns to choose from. When I craft, I don't have to worry about 3 or 4 mages spamming EQs at my door. Some people PvP the whole time they are online, but most of us probably PvP about 30% of the time and PvM or craft the rest. Given a choice, I can't see the law-abiding Trammies voluntarily uprooting to play on a fel-only server. In fact, some hardcore PvPers might think twice when they have to give up their Tram homes.
I could see all the Felucca facets consolidated, though. One felucca that everybody in the US shards was transported to when they wanted to PvP. Another for Europe and a third for Japan. That would increase the number of players in Fel dramatically. It would have some other interesting aspects, too. Since players from other shards would be there, people could do cross-shard trades a lot more easily. People from the really low-population shards would have access to goods that are currently over-abundant on high-pop shards. And the Felucca facet would have a huge, dynamic population. I can see some guild wars between guilds that operate on different facets. Cross-shard friendships and rivalries. Lots of benefits to players interacting with players from other shards.
The biggest problem with consolidation of the Fel shards into one big PvP shard would be housing. There would be a lot of ways to handle the problem. Increasing the land area would be one. Make a new Felucca that isn't just a copy of Trammel. Give it new towns, new dungeons, new land masses so all of the people who now live in Felucca could transfer their houses to the new Fel. If the devs were too lazy or busy to create whole new areas, the new Fel could just have all of the same land masses as Malas, Tokuno, illshenar (leveled a little to make placing houses easier) and Ter Mur, all empty and open for houses, for that matter. After all, you would have PvPers from a dozen shards playing there. Let players who currently have houses in Fel of their home shards have 90 days to find a new house spot, give the people with castles something like two weeks to place first, then people with keeps get a week, then large towers and max storage customized homes get 5 days, etc. so that people wouldn't be living in a castle and be reduced to an 8x8, and make moving easy; maybe a tool that lets them just move the whole existing home to a new plot the same size on the new Fel facet. Make new items that aren't overpowered, but that only spawn in the new Fel dungeons. I can already see the strategies for tackling a Slasher of Veils in a Fel ruleset dungeon full of factioners. Give people a good reason to go dungeon-crawling in Fel without bringing along 100 guildies to fight a faction war. Make the new Fel a place that people will be happy to move to, not one that makes them grumble about losing their old home spot.
I think that if it's handled properly, consolidating all of the Fels into just one for the US, one for Europe and one for Japan could be really good for the game as a whole.