Wich is a change to how it works on era realms. Even Thorns doesn’t tag you there. Only deliberately attacking the guards. On HC realms you get auto pvp enabled if they attack. Wich is stupid
I think this might actually be deliberate. With HC realms they changed that you cannot attack a pvp enabled player, without first manually enabling pvp. You cannot even buff a pvp enabled player if not flagged for pvp yourself ( I’ve tried that). Not getting flagged for pvp when a guard attacks you, would mean you can’t cc or defend yourself if you wish to, without first manually flagging yourself.
So this left Blizzard with 2 bad choices, either not change the mechanics and leave people without a means to fight right back or changing the mechanics and making people vulnerable to griefing.
Personally I think not changing it would have been better though to have left it as it was. You can always run away (which most people accidentally aggroing a guard tend to do).
When I got flagged for pvp by a quest in Hinterlands, I logged out hoping the timer would tick while I was offline. But no, it doesn’t. It takes 5 minutes to get un-flagged.
Yes, you can HS. But you better be sure your HS is in a safe location.
If your HS is in Gadgetzan and you HS while flagged for pvp, the guards will kill you.
I think that would take to much away from the atmosphere - enemy settlements should be the scary I better stay away from area. If you play like alliance and run though the barrens it feels just hostile … so many enemy camps you have to stay away from and not just ignore the guards and maybe have an friendly alliance party at the crossroads. At least the liftguard to thousend needles is yellow so it lets alliance use the lift save.
Thruth be told I don’t entirely get why they had to change the mechanics in the first place. It is a PVE server so anyone flagging themselves for PVP should be aware they can be attacked without warning.
Although i guess the possibilities to survive from something like this are nearly to zero. There will be many enemies waiting to kill you on those locations, just for fun.