As someone who doesn’t play PvP - where’s the line between “acceptable” PvP and harassment, especially in a free-for-all sandbox game?
If they murder you, murder your pets, murder your thralls and burn down your house, isn’t that just PvP? But if, after doing all that, they keep following you around, insulting you and your family and otherwise making life a pain, that’s a different story (but that’s not PvP-specific behavior, that can just as easily be done on PvE).
Raiding bases whose owners are offline seems like standard operating procedure.
Based on what I’ve seen on the forums over the last year is that people often have issues with PvP being unfair. This thread is another example of that.
So to answer the question in your title: to a certain extent, yes, it’s working as intended. The intention was to give players a playground and let the players survive, build, dominate and make their own rules. It just turned out that we weren’t ready for such a responsibility.