Possibly.
I think the game is not the same as WOW, and you can't make the comparison legitimately. After all, in EVE you can blackmail and cheat people, and you're quite unlikely to reach an endgame level without crushing a few skulls. So first, nobody is innocent enough to warrant a "poor me" victim status, and second everyone who plays knows what the game is like. If you die, you lose your shit. It doesn't get damaged a little and kick you back to town for a rez. Compared to EVE, WOW is like a carebear in a padded cell.
No arguments. I stand by this. Some games are simply more hardcore than others. You can't compare to another game blindly and expect your favorite to be harsher than the other one. And if you don't like it, you don't have to play.
That was an unnecessarily harsh response. I have played EVE, at one point with two active accounts. I also firmly believe that WoW is "Baby's First MassMOG." However, World of Warcraft is ubiquitous, and thus a perfect choice when an analogy is needed.
Dying and losing your shit to PKs/Pirates isn't new to the genre. Sometimes you get ganked - that's the way the cookie crumbles. You don't like it? Stay in high-sec space. But what I'm saying is that this goes above and beyond simple piracy. Standard pirates don't pod you, because they'd rather you came back with fancy new gear they can steal again. It's not in their financial interest to have you spend money on things that you don't drop when you die. Standard pirates don't scam their way into your Corp only to steal everything that isn't bolted down.
This was simply the worst type of griefing. I guarantee you that if this happened in, say, South Korea, the follow-up story would be the arrest of the Ubiqua Seraph CEO for the assault/murder of the guy playing Arenis Xemdal.
Fortunately, the more I read, the more I hear comments echoing what Qmarx has said - GHSC were essentially doing some drunken boasting, and Ubiqua Seraph is still going strong.
Here's my opinion in a nutshell: PKers/Pirates are part of the game, without them the game loses a lot of its appeal. Griefers are an entirely different animal and should be thrown to the skeletal carp. Pirates kill you to make a profit. Griefers kill you because they get off on ruining other peoples' experiences. If you're part of a decently-sized Corp, you have people to back you up - people to grief the griefers. But if you're a new guy who just spent his last ISK on a nice mining frigate only to be destroyed and podded on your way back from your first haul, you're screwed.