I truly do not understand the reasoning behind this, or why it is such an issue. There is an option for force all sectors to be PvE. I am unable to locate any mention of a method to force PvE. Apparently it's either all PvP, or Random, and that's it. So basically what I have to do to run a PvE server is... Regularly shut the server down to modify the database and files. Head to the Plafields table of the database, filter sectors where "ispvp" = 1 and copy out the list of sector names. Change all values to 0. Open the yaml file for each affected playfield and change "PvP: True" to "PvP: False" Manually find and delete the world.dat and all area files for the affected playfields. Start the server and double-check that the changes took place. This is extremely tedious. You need to add an option to gameoptions.yams for "ForcePvE: True", or change the options of ForcePvP to something that will allow to force either PvP, PvE, or none. This wasn't such a bad issue when I only had to edit 87 playfields once. Now we've got somewhere in the range of 20,000 potential playfields, and I don't have any templates on them until they are created. If I wait more than a couple of days in between edits, I have a few hundred new playfields I have to fix.
This is a great suggestion! Hopefully we see some more options like this in the future. It's best to create your own custom scenario before starting the save game. That way you can do a find and replace in files using notepad++ or a similar editor and make a single change to force all playfields to be PvE with a single edit instead of having to constantly edit new playfields as they are formed.
That's just the issue though. Even with this I am unable to unilaterally force PvE. There is no option in the scenario to force PvE. I believe I may have found a workaround in going to Empyrion\Content\Playfields and editing playfield_dynamic.yaml to change PvPProb to 0 in all of them. It's still a pain in the ass to have to go in and do all of this editing when there should just be a simple option.