PvP

[savaughn]

Trivial civilian NPCs such as quest givers and vendors will now give dishonor points to players that prey upon them. We haven't decided upon a specific penalty but it will be enough that the majority of players will not wish to engage in combat with those NPCs.

What does that mean again: "the majority of players"? All this half-hearted talk again. Anyone who kills such an NPC should get his account banned! ;)
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You may not like it, but the simple fact of the matter is that Blizzard considers PvP a majority component of the end game content - even on PvE servers. Once you've done the high level raid areas a couple times and have gotten bored of alts, PvP is the only thing left in the game to keep you around. So either Blizz accepts that people will quit their subscriptions after 8 months or they put an opt-in PvP onto every server to try and keep these people playing. And, no, saying "those people should go to PvP servers" is not a legitimate response.

On a PvE server, you have explicitly picked a server where you have to be PROVOKED into PvP. As such, there must be a mechanism for this provocation or the large chunk of end game content is gone. Blizz will never ban players for killing quest NPCs nor will they make them un-attackable. This is, quite simply, the right thing for them to do long term, despite a handful of players not liking it right now.