First off theres no game, theres a test of a early access to come game. I already tested over 700h.
Yes gamers today might call horse killing griefing but hey people are soft, wont make it griefing just because snowflakes claim so.
Crashing events is not griefing and to my knowledge you wont get banned for crashing and slaughtering everyone present as me and my guild used to do that every chance we got for PvP. People learned to expect it and hire players to guard expecting us. A perfect example of a good sandbox without NPC OP guards.
Spawn camping is griefing, tricking noobs to go gray in order to loot them, plant stolen items on noobs to have them murdered by guards is griefing. (flagging no longer an issue luckily)
Playing the game and taking advantage of players not thinking is not griefing even if the target feels grieved by it.
But if you park your mount or pet in public while going afk thats asking for players to kill it. Imagine if another player feels grieved by your mount parked in the middle of Fabernum, are you then a griefer by your standards ?
Education is good yes, copy/pasting is not. You shouldnt pick up too much from SV, just a friendly tip
Well go back to your post you say why are not there guys banned then, well because they didnt break any rules to get banned.
For example killing me or you is fine, killing horses in town is just good for business but spawn killing Henrik or disrupting planned tests, etc.
How to limit or rid towns of griefers ?
Well first off you get rid off mindless abusable guards.
Then you create incentives for players to actually guard towns they live in so that they do it by themselves. Maybe have a high rep treshhold that appoints you to the rank of city guard. Break the law and you get thrown out after 3 strikes.
That way players will do what guards are found wanting.
As you say yourself guards need to be more powerful then OP and defy every law and limit the game puts on players, now we have powerhouse NPCs able to crush player raids on towns which was a HUGE problem in MO. Trust me players having brains will always figure out how to farm or disable or bug out NPCs so guards will always have to get buffed and buffed and buffed until we end at where every player run around with 10 personal Lictor pokemons to fight for them since nothing in the game can beat them and players always use the best possible weapon they can.