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I have a slight problem with this line of thinking, mainly based on my infamous bias for L2
The only difference between L2's karma system and AoC's corruption system is the resources that drop on death. Yes, there's also the stat dampening for Red players, but that's a change for such extreme cases that we can disregard that for now.
We've yet to see exactly how much stuff we drop on death, so it's difficult to say how much desire there'll be in people to kill another player for their resources (and that's even considering that you'd know which resources that target even has).
From what I've seen from pvp-dislikers and alleged casuals, their main problem is that they'll get attacked out of nowhere for no apparent reason while they're just chilling and doing their thing. From all my experience in L2, that would happen maaaaybe once a week and that's only if you came across some PK-lover who's just going around harassing people (any pvpers hate them too and love to hunt them asap).
Now what should be added to that experience is that L2 had several "people funnels" that always pushed players of a similar lvl together to create that good ol' soft friction that Steven likes to mention. And the higher your lvl was, the fewer funnels there'd be (but they'd be all-encompassing), so at top lvls your usual day in L2 would be spent in maybe 2-3 locations and that IF you wanted to farm different things that day. Within that funnel you'd have even more "sub-funnels" based on the lvl of mobs and their drops. So within those limited high lvl locations you'd have a limited amount of rooms to farm.
And in the context of all of that, most (if not all) people completely understood the concept of "I gotta fight for my right to
party
farm". If someone attacked you while you were farming those rooms - that wasn't "out of nowhere" and it wasn't "for no reason". You knew exactly why they did so and you usually were prepared for it (held the camera pointed at the entrance to your dungeon room). And you'd usually do the same to the person who was farming that room before you.
This was the social contract of the game and the flagging system supported it. While you were farming, you'd see a dude stand at the entrance to your room (if camera angles allowed, he'd probably be standing just outside around the corner looking in). He'd watch you farm the mobs to see how strong you are. If you were strong, there'd be a chance he'll just move along to check out other room. If you were slow and weak, he might just start pulling mobs himself and start killing them way faster than you, non-verbally telling you "this is my room now because I can farm it better". In the case of the latter, you might try attacking him to show him that your pvp is stronger than your pve (I've seen such cases before). If you do in fact win in pvp, there's a chance that he comes back to fight you again, if the fight was really tight and equal (especially if you attacked him while he was fighting mobs). Run-back time could range from just seconds to a minute or two, depending on how deep you were in the dungeon (L2 had a TP system), which allowed you to prepare for his return and maybe have a better rotation for the fight (he would have it too). If you won again, quite a lot of people would just change rooms at this point because in their eyes you earned your farm of that room.
And due to how dungeons were designed, the run-back (or just getting deeper into the dungeon) would have you pass other lower lvled rooms with people farming them, which usually would dissuade people from PKing, because they knew that there were people (even if they were low lvl) who'd immediately run to kill you for some potential juicy lot. That was the case because a shout in chat would usually cover the whole dungeon's area (sometimes even more), so just yellng "hey peeps, there's a PK in such and such room - go kill 'em, they're low on hp" would usually not only provide a swift revenge, but would even have a chance of someone resurrecting you after they've dealt with the PKer (done so myself a ton of times).
Now all of that is just an example of how the social side of the flagging system worked. Unless we literally drop 50% of our resources on death in Ashes, I highly doubt the contract would be too different from the one in L2, so I truly believe that people are way too scared of the system that they've never experienced before.
Now the main exception to this line of thinking is L2's guild wars and what I believe AoC's equivalent of them to be - node wars. My example from L2 mainly worked for party gameplay, because most dungeons in L2 required you to be in a party (or at least with a full stack of support chars). Anything soloable was the land of the casuals that rarely had pvp, outside of low lvl guild war squabbles. And those squabbles were the main hardcore part of the whole pvp system.
Being in a guild that was at war could be very taxing and difficult for the unprepared. Most locations would have at least a few players from the warring guild (especially if you were at war with a big guild or against several guilds), who'd have complete ffa PKing rights against you. You afked for one minute to get some tea? You might come back to a dead character with the chat log reading "so and so dealt 10 hits of this much damage to you"(with that player being from a warring guild). You were peacefully farming a lower lvled room in some dungeon? The high lvl warring dudes would kill you on their way deeper into the dungeon just cause you were at war with them.
I'm assuming this is the experience of most WoW players or really any other faction-based mmo players, because that's usually the case in faction-based mmos, where people have full PKing rights for their enemies. Now what made L2 better than all those faction-based shitholes is that you could leave your guild at any time. Most reasonable GLs would be fine with you leaving for a while to get stronger, and quite a lot of them would just have a second guild for all the players who wanted to still stay in touch, but didn't want to suffer the war difficulties.
Now, AoC's guild wars will be way more goal-based in the design, as opposed to a just "we're at war until someone exits it like a pussy or until we have a bigger enemy to kill together"-type of deal from L2. And iirc Ashes guild wars will be more of an evening event than endless slaughter of your enemies. But Node Wars, from what I've read, seem like the exact copy of L2's guild wars. The mayor declares war on another node and both sides' citizens have a ffa fight through the duration of the war.
The main problem I see with that system is that changing a Node is not as easy as changing a guild in L2 was, so most casuals who live in a Node at war would probably have a bad time. And I think that this feature will have to be tested even more than the Corruption system to truly know what a casual's day in the game would look like and how scary would any prospect of pvp be for them.
TL;DR we've seen this flagging system function just fine before, so I really don't think it's as spooky as some people make it out to be.