The PVP changes in BD worry me as well. For those that don't know, BD has changed it's open world pvp rule set from open world gank fest to :
You have to be at the soft cap (lvl 50) in order to go into pvp mode,and you can only kill players lvl 50+. Players still complained that was too much of a gank fest, so the devs have now added a Karma system (exactly like in L2) and no xp loss on death from pvp.
Having a Karma system is ok, but first Player to flag (i.e to hit) another Player, receives 10k karma points (you can have a total of 300k karma points). The Player stays flagged for 3 minutes, and anyone is free to kill the flagged Player without receiving a penalty in return. On the contrary, if the flagged Player kills someone, they will receive a penalty of 20k Karma points no matter if the other Player is fighting back or not, allowing for an unfair event to take place.
When you get Karma, and become red, you suffer from several penalties. If you die, you drop items. You can’t enter towns because the guards will kill you. It is almost impossible to burn Karma when playing in a party because you need to get the last hit on the monster and Karma burning really slow, like -70 points per mob. So, if you kill players and get 100k Karma and let’s say for example burn only -70 per monster, you need to kill 1430 monsters, all alone, and anyone can kill you.
Lastly, if a player receives Karma, their whole guild suffers and the guild gets negative points as well. So while the Guild Karma system is a good way of reflecting their members behaviour, it needs to be included in the overall PvP-Karma System renovation, as to not deter Guild Wars and destroy open world PvP and the corresponding politics and meta-game features.