I come from EvE Online, and it seems like there's a lot that prevents fights from happening in Perpetuum that would have happened in EvE.
Want to take someone's space?
EvE: SOV timer vuln windows are publically available. POS towers are vulnerable at any time and display the RF timer publically.
Perpetuum: You have to physically travel to the outpost you want scan, use a semi-expensive scan probe (at least for a newer guy like me, seriously it costs more than a light bot), avoid the inhabitants since it gives away your location, all for an approximate time that one of three locations will have a SAP.
Want to shoot at a miner/ratter?
EvE: Miners are always in belts or mining anomalies, all of which can be warped to immediately and you arrive in seconds. Ratters tend to live in combat sites, and there are usually more combat sites than ratters, but you can narrow it down with Dscan relatively quickly. Both miners and ratters can be detected from anywhere in system via combat probes.
Perpetuum: Bring a guy with a geoscanner to locate ore pockets where there might be someone. As for mission runners, good luck, they could be anywhere.

I'm not saying I know everything, but perhaps this is why EvE seems to have literally a thousand times more players online at any given time? Maybe a developer could explain their reasoning to me?