During the panel Howard explained exactly what killing players in PvP entails and interestingly, there’s more to it than it would seem.
First off, killing a player in PvP is a thing you can always do, there’s no way to be immune to death in this game. It is possible to be immune to killing by turning on the Pacifism tag, but it’s not possible to not get killed (just like in real life!). However, killing a player in PvP nets you no reward, paints a big red sign on you visible on the map at all times and hides other players’ signs from you (also just like in real life if you think about it). Hearing that the crowd cheered. Cheered for murder, or so Todd believes.
After that, killing the murderer will award you a bounty, paid from their reserves of caps. So essentially, killing people in PvP is a way of saying, to the entire world: come and get me. It’s you versus the world now Scott.
Which I don’t know if that was the intent… But is kind of cool. It seems like an (T)odd, indirect way of an additional layer of difficulty to put into your game and creates something of a meta-game. I eagerly await the emergence of player-killers exclusively hunting other player-killers, if that’s possible.
So yeah, cool stuff. Certainly an interesting way to tackle multiplayer griefing.