I think we can all agree that max level characters ganking lowbies is a bad thing that does not promote healthy communities or good PvP practices. We also know that the instant anyone talks about making any group unattackable on a PvP server, people collectively go into a rage. So, how about we discuss ways to solve the problem of lowbie ganking that doesn't involve making them outright immune to high level attack?
1.Scaling
The first and most obvious problem is that high level characters have such high defenses (armor, hitpoints, etc) that lowbies cannot realistically hurt them, combined with the fact that high levels do so much more damage that they typically one shot lowbies with massive amounts of overkill in a single swing.
We could simply scale damage up/down based on general level ranges. Take a hypothetical (and somewhat unrealistic example, but it makes math easier) and say that a max lvl character has a flat 10x the hitpoints and does 10x the damage of the lowbie. One way evening the playing field a bit would be to say that the lowbie gets a 10x damage modifier against the max level character, while the max lvl gets all of his damage scaled down 1/10th. Now we've got a max lvl and a lowbie that are doing equal amounts of damage to each other when using the same attacks (so say they both do the same basic % of damage to each other with their auto attacks).
2.Alternate Hitpoints and Damage
Another option would be to simply ignore the PvE statistics when it comes to PvP, and use a secondary set entirely. Say all characters have 100 PvP hitpoints, and that instead of scaling damage with level, attacks have a fixed amount of damage against other players regardless of level. Auto attacks could always do 1 point of damage each. Really big finishers could do say 10 points of damage each. This way it doesn't matter what level the two players are, they could still have a meaningful fight against each other, and it would not require constant rebalancing.
It would still favor the higher level character, in that they would be more likely to have access to CC and finishing type moves than the lowbie, as with the first option, but again it would be a gap that could be filled by player skill.
3.Penalize the High Level
Since we don't want to say that it would be outright impossible for high levels to attack lowbies, there are a variety of methods we could use to penalize players that partake in what we can generally acknowledge to be undesirable activities. If PvP ends up with a currency system based on honor like WoW does, simply have low level targets decrease honor. The greater the level discrepency, the more honor you lose for killing the defenseless. It would encourage attacks against high level characters, while discouraging ganking of lowbies.
4.Staying with the spirit of PvP policing itself, what if the system assigned some sort of bounty on the heads of people that routinely attack lowbies? The more lowbies you gank, the higher the price on your head becomes so that other PvP'ers have increased reason to attack you? Have the dishonorable players be worth more honor for the attacker, so that anyone that goes out of their way to constantly attack lowbies ends up having the entire other faction constantly camping them in return. Say the increased honor value goes up every time you kill a lowbie, and goes down every time someone kills you.
