I've always wanted to play this game, but couldn't afford a sub. With the freemium feature I know might, but I'm tired of some things on MMOs, so here's the question:
-how is pvp? Are there hidden rewards that could affect my gameplay within it?

Personally I would like to 100% avoid pvp, since I left other big games due it's requirement to get some ingame comodities and I'm not in the mood to start fresh a new game and find out that I will not have how to avoid it if I want to proceed. Example:
-I'm pretty much a solo player and will focus on crafting, so to make some piece of tech I will need some mat that's only avaiable on pvp areas, and this is a deal breaker.

Thanks in advance for all info.

Every area is technically a PvP area there are no hard restrictions stopping someone from destroying your ship.

On occasion I venture into home nation space of the enemy faction and destroy newbie ships when they are getting started. This is completely allowed by the game - it is up to you and other pilots to defend yourselves - it's a combat-oriented game. I have actually made a number of friends this way, and some of of the new players I destroyed actually ended up changing sides and joining my guild.

The intention is for security to be a commodity. The idea is to buy and sell security and escorts like any other commodity and this is impossible if the game imposes hard stops against damage. There are player groups dedicated to protecting pilots of each faction that sometimes try and oppose my actions. There are also player groups who encourage and facilitate my actions - so it is a competitive environment by nature between the major game factions.

I believe Star Citizen is adopting the same model where anyone could be killed anywhere, but there are consequences for the attacker (such as the recently introduced jail).

Did you try No Man's Sky? I have played a bit of that recently and its got an insane crafting system which as far as I understand you can pursue solo without needing to be involved in PvP. The depth of the crafting system there is hard to compete with. VO's crafting system is more geared around making things that would help you in PvP or to trade at higher volumes while protected, rather than making an impressive base like you can do in No Man's Sky.

There are no PVP-only materials that you need to acquire. There are some weapons (rail guns) that require a certain number of PKs to unlock, but that's only if you want to buy them from stations yourself. I'm pretty sure that if you buy them from other players you can still equip them without any PKs, at least in Greyspace. There's also one ship (the EC-107) that you can only unlock through PVP, but it's really just a novelty unless you're a broke pirate wanting to save a couple minutes as you rebuild. You won't be missing out on anything if you never get it.

One trickier thing is the Conquerable Stations. Conquering a station is a PVP activity, and you need access to those stations to run many crafting processes. That said, you don't necessarily have to do the conquering to get access. You can just make friends with whatever group currently owns the station (possibly by throwing money at them) and get them to grant you access. Some people will give access to literally anyone who asks, simple as that. Of course, there are other groups that might refuse categorically (e.g. because you're a member of an opposing nation or guild). In those cases, you just wait for somebody else to conquer the station (or maybe pay some mercs to do it for you).

Point being, while you can't necessarily avoid other people attacking you, there's nothing forcing you to actually care about it -- the game doesn't gate your progression based on whether you're good at PVP. It's perfectly valid to just flee from aggressors, or try to bribe us (works on most pirates), or just shrug and die. The game doesn't penalize you for dying, other than by losing your ship, gear, and cargo. Ships and gear are relatively cheap here, at least until you start playing with capships. Then things get pricier.

Thanks for all the answers, despite beeing a genre that I much love, space mmo, I'm looking for 100% pvp free game, meaning I don't care if game have or not pvp, as long I'm not drawn to it, I just want to wander around without beeing bothered by others and getting some improvements in the process. I've found a game this way once by accident but devs did the big mistake to lock areas with keys and levels, so for you to reach certain regions you'll need to get to XX level regardless you have the key to access it or not what is a foolish move. And I think I don't need to tell you I had a character on the most famous space mmo ever released, but the false no pvp feeling, drove me away.

Anyway thanks again for your time.

If you dont like PvP games, i suggest looking into single player games instead of MMOs. There are many excellent space games that you can play alone.

It can be rather hard to avoid the non consentual pvp unless you have a lot of experiance

Actually a coop game is more of my alley. Back on the age of Ragnarok people could play entire game without bothering with pvp, yet it was present on the game, we could run dungeons in large organized groups and the pvp team would enjoy this effort by buying our loot. And this was a game played by the entire world, thousands of players on each regional official servers, not to mention independent ones, some even exist until today.

But devs latelly had this idea that everyone should be in pvp, wanting or not, and by doing so, not only they doom their products to a limited lifetime but a gamewide population shrink in very short time.

Well, that's what I just noticed on several good looking games I've played over the years. So MMO is awesome, in all genres, as long no one is "forced" to do something they don't like to. I believe both gametypes can co-exist as long they don't mix things, both gametypes together never pleases anyone. An open minded dev might see this, there are few other games with coop and pvp without mixing but unfortunatelly they have other problems that need to be looked into.

Thanks again.

I don't know if it's still going/updating, but a cool indy space game I played a few years ago called "Ascent: The Space Game" was very cool. When I played, pvp wasn't even a thing yet (it was getting developed at the time). Instead, the gameplay was all about exploring/crafting/trading/etc, with cool "in-game" politics (you could gain senate membership, vote for galactic president, etc).

It was being made by a couple guys in a garage, much like how I envision Guild Software started.

Worth checking out if pvp is definitely not your thing.

Limit Theory was looking so promising as one of these games you could play just to relax, explore and build pretty things. So sad to see it flopped as a Kickstarter.

As much as you might always be in a “pvp zone” VO is so empty you can easily play and not engage in Pvp most of the time.

Shhhh.. Greenwall! Up til now this thread was a great sales pitch to anyone who WANTED a pvp game.

Actually Greenwall, VO is pretty active right now. It is the opposite of empty.

I spent an hour flying through greyspace today and only ran into Boda because he is in my discord. Like wait until the marketing kicks in mate.