It has nothing about morality, virtue signaling or political purposes. We want the game to reach a large audience of players and allow for a place for new shitters to gear up to then lose it out in the map with PvP. What does currently having guards in the GY remove from the game besides the whole slippery slope idea you've got going that SV is going to remove PvP completely.
Is it just new players fighting eachother and learning the game? Or is it mainly veterans as per usual stomping new players into the dust for kicks and giggles? I'd bet the net positive of allowing new players or poor players regain some wealth at a ridiculously low rate in relative safety outweighs the enjoyment a handful of players get from slapping nakeds with steel.
It´s not an idea. It´s an educated guess based on my observations and every patch reinforces it. You can close your eyes to it if you like.
To put it another way: Is there a single aspect of this game that is
more hardcore than the first iteration?
People from various guilds going around claiming how they love the noobs, would never hurt the noobs and how "griefers" are destroying the game is political. It´s a standard "I´m good - you´re bad, so you argument is invalid" approach.
Reaching for the "bigger" audience is a bullshit argument as well. What would that entail? You know that the biggest possible audiences does not want open PvP and full loot at all, right? By that logic MO2 should not exist. It is also why no big serious company makes a game like MO2. Going for the "bigger" audience instead of focusing on the strength of your own design will not work out in the long run.
Your last paragraph again is just virtue signaling about how you think killing new players is bad. You also make vast assumptions. In MO1 I´ve barely ever seen someone in steel around graveyards unless sweeping through. Even if that was a thing, it´s easily prevented by all you morally upstanding citizens killing said loot piniata. Afterall, he must be bad because he uses steel to kill new players. But you won´t have to, because it´s a fantasy. It will be mostly terrible players with flakestone swords and very often they will kill each other in the process.
New player DO need to learn how to fight back, avoid conflict, find safe farming spots. Giving them one fucking spot to farm is a terrible design to start with. Bandaiding it by putting lictors in it is polishing a turd.
In the end you can continue to turn off PvP in more and more areas with the same arguments that being made in this thread. It won´t help the new players or the game in the long run. Unless you ideal game revolves around players falling back on the lictor graveyard for farming repeatedly because they never learned how to handle the real game. Which would be a sad game that deserves to die to be honest.
