The thing to keep in mind is that this VRMMO is entirely geared towards PvP - all the PvE stuff is there for is grinding and special events.
Which means that, of course, we're not dealing with ordinary PKers.
They're fucking farming the other players. (Remember the field full of loot bags in the previous chapter? They took the good stuff and left the rest behind.)
Which also means they're using every goddamned dirty trick in the book, regardless if they actually need to or not, to do their thing. Because when you're doing this shit "professionally", then there's no such thing as overkill. Just risk vs reward - in which case you want to minimize risk as much as possible by using dirty tricks to maximize the reward.