There will be no real PvP system

[MongoJerry]

You forget how many exploratory/see-everything type of players we have here, Mongo.  Without an anti-griefing system in place, that style of play simply can't be done.  You know, in closed beta I never finished quests in a number of areas because they were camped by griefers on a nightly basis.  I can only imagine the average Lurker's reaction after trying to complete the upper-end elite quests in the Redridge Mountains only to be ganked and corpse camped for five straight nights by griefers there.  It happened to me.  The same scenario played out in Duskwood, Hillsbrad, Alterac Mountains, and other zones.

I'm too tired tonight to do a full response, so I'll just focus on this piece of what you said. A document that really openned my eyes to the world of players in these kinds of games is this one linked here. It was originally written for MUD's, but the concepts apply to games like WoW, which are glorified MUD's:

http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

One of the things it discusses is the fact that explorer-type personalities like Lurkers tend to be would actually tend to be the least bothered by player killers, because we as explorers tend to range off into distant lands, while player killers like to stay in zones with a high concentration of potential victims. This is very true of WoW, where there are certain zones that have a high concentration of ganking and yet when one travels outside of those zones, the frequency of ganking and griefing drops off precipitously. Which areas are the worst? Why, precisely the ones you mentioned -- Hillsbrad, Alterac, and I'll add Stranglethorn Vale to that. Redridge and Duskwood on occation as players come up from Stranglethorn Vale, (but I would add that I saw plenty of defence of those two zones as well when I ventured in them with my hunter). Venture outside those zones and you'll see very little of that griefing by level capped players that you complain so much about.

This gets back to the problem I've discussed with you several times -- about how you kept on creating new characters and never saw any of the higher end content. Of course you saw a lot of griefing -- because you kept starting new characters and throwing yourself at the zones where the most griefing occured! Once you hit level 30, you have lots of places -- both outdoors and in instance dungeons -- where you can quest and explore without fear of the worst gankers. Once you hit level 40, you're going to be adventuring in zones where the griefers don't tread and even if one griefer or a group of griefers did come to one zone, you'll have so many places you could go instead -- or so many places to disappear to within a given zone -- that it wouldn't matter.

Now, of course, you're going to run into the occational skirmish, but that's not what we're talking about here. After all, if you never want to fight members of the opposing faction, then you wouldn't play on the PvP server in the first place. But when it comes to the big assholes like that level 60 mage who kept running around the lake in Redridge (as if a dishonor system would have stopped him), us exploration Lurkers would actually fare quite well on PvP servers.