Whats SB like these days?

I played SB when it first came out. The class sytem I really liked. The building system I really liked, although it was far too expensive. The town/guild system was kinda cool.

I leveled up a birdman barbarian to 60 and had a few others in the 40+ range. The problem on our server was that there were two alliances. One was hard core PvP, the alliance I was in. The other was hard core carebear. The carebears would never instigate a fight, all they wanted to do was build their little cities. 3/4ths+ of the server were carebears. Any time the PvP alliance would attack a city, the entire server would show up to defend. Grossly outnumbered we still managed to pull off a few victories. But in retaliation, the entire server would raid our towns.

To me it was just plain stupid. A PvP game where 75% of the server population didn't want to PvP.

I started another character on another server, only to get ganked constantly, no matter where I went there was someone twice my level or higher ready to kill me. I tried another server, same thing. Then I gave up.

I don't mind the occasional gank, but getting killed 3-4 times an hour by someone I had no chance in hell of killing...it got old real fast.

Did they ever implement anything to prevent people from running around killing newbies? Whats the end-game like these days? Are there still more politics than city raids?