This game has so much potential from a PVE standpoint. Remember the opening of the Alpha 2 Islands? We had to clear out tons of npcs to "unlock" the terminals. I had a great time, rolling out with RG and 62nd to clear out Shinjalar.
Incursions by npcs would be an awesome idea. Random events where the natives attempt to take back an Island, or two or three. It fit's in with Hunter's post about mutual goals as well... Maybe the NPCs are so strong most of the player base has to band together to force them back...
Islands with real time npc wars taking place. Band together with robots of your same race in order to win objectives.
Teleports that take you to another island (instanced probably) where you have to complete objectives with some sort of boss robot fight or a big fight against a walled off turreted npc fortification. Maybe even make some of them put a sort of beacon that can be hacked by enemy forces (players) and raided for further pvp content.
This game needs this pve content, as well as new shiny (super expensive bots most everyone will only use for pve -- that doesn't come from materials only found on pvp islands). I've been saying this for 3 years. Maybe we'd be able to hit those 5000+ concurrent player goals I know this game is capable of... if only it had a touch more.
Problem is, Devs are too small a team to be able to implement anything like this in any kind of timeframe beyond years, and since moving the servers they're too broke to be able to hire more devs for that content. I don't mean this to be offensive to the devs, you guys have worked so hard on this for so many years... but realisticly it's just a pipe dream.
Probaly doesn't help much that the current playerbase is screaming for Gamma to be done either, but I doubt that's going to make much a difference with the population. (i.e I doubt we're gonna see more people playing once gamma is re-released than there are now.) I know a 2nd look at missions is planned after the gamma re-release, but hopefully, as soon as possible after gamma we can get some PVE love going in this game.