So... maybe a hot take, but here it is:
If you experience people frequently running from your roleplay, maybe the problem is you.
Examine what you're doing that makes people prefer to break character, and maybe the rules, to get away from what you're offering as fast as they possibly can.
If you're fun to play with - literally nobody runs from you. Ever. They may even run towards you, eager to be cut down, just so they can roleplay with you more. I can think of many players that I would die (literally) to have a storyline with if that is the direction things went. Are you one of those players? Why, or why not?
PVP was used to make some of the best and most memorable storylines I've ever had. Defeats, specifically.
However, and this is a big one, PVP is also very frequently used, usually as a crutch for a total lack of creativity (or worse), by people that just haven't been banned yet. Such players leave a lot of damage in their wake, sometimes numbering in the dozens or even hundreds of negative experiences, and that damage can sometimes never go away; the same way that once trust is broken it is near impossible to repair.
Players that have been on the receiving end of such players are sure to have lost trust in the PVP system as it stands, and I can hardly blame them in some of these cases.
On Competition Undertones:
Arelith is more finely and fastidiously balanced for PVP than most AAA+ multi-million dollar exclusively pvp-oriented games.
I think it is disingenuous to dismiss Arelith as not having competitive, and sometimes extremely competitive, undertones.
If you enter into high profile politics your roleplay is not merely dictated by roleplay, but on the power of you and your friends and their ability to protect that roleplay since Arelith's politics and Highlander's immortal catchphrase are very similar. The preservation of which relies almost exclusively on current metas, player skill, weight of numbers, and maybe most importantly - player eagerness to be the first to engage in PVP.
Almost none of those things are strictly roleplay, though weight of numbers does naturally come with being very fun to play with, but the majority of the time the loser of any conflict is, for all intents and purposes, deleted. How is this not competitive in some manner or another?
I have mostly mixed feelings on the nature of competition on Arelith, some good and bad, but I as I said earlier it seems odd to me to claim it isn't there at all. We can debate the metrics of it, I think, but surely we can all agree it is there at least.