Earlier quoted context omitted.
It adds a consequence to griefing/PVP. If you’re a pirate who has been to prison multiple times you really don’t want to go back… so your behavior is different.
Hot take: trying to appeal to both PvP and PvE players is the biggest mistake game designers make. History is littered with the corpses of "WoW killers" in the MMORPG genre and nearly all of them touted PvP as their killer feature, usually some form of world PvP. And it never works. Even WoW largely moved away from world PvP in favour of sandboxed PvP (ie arena, battlegrounds). This focus on PvP is my biggest concern…
The reason so many games want "as open as possible" PvP as possible is because of people, too. There are plenty of people who's most fun in any multiplayer comes from acting upon other players and making other players miserable is a very "rewarding" action to them.
That's an entire quadrant of players (Killers) in Bartle's now classic diagram and of the studies that have been done in the past there's a pretty equal distribution of how people self-describe themselves to the four quadrants (and how their stats seem to align in MUDs that used to track such things). Assuming that hypothesis to hold, that's a fourth of the potential audience they lose if they don't have PvP at all, and within that quadrant it always seems like the most vocal in what they play is based on how "open" the PvP is and the raw statistics of the number of people they can act upon ("grief").
I get the impression that many of those vocal "Killer" players that strongly prefer open world PvP are possibly over-represented in MMO design efforts. Two of the quadrants ("Achiever" and "Explorer") are often pleased enough with single player games (and single player game design) to not even see a need for multiplayer games in their lives, and the final "Socializer" quadrant these days is just as often left by game designs to fall through the cracks to "non-games" like Second Life or Discord.