I think one part of the problem is the fact that killing someone the "normal" way can be nearly impossible. If you're not a mul/giant or someone with unbelievably high strength and a Club of Lucky Headshots +5, killing with conventional combat is barely an option unless there's a locked door involved. Walking up to someone in the open and typing 'kill man' will result in death 0% of the time.
Namino touched upon the combat delays some pages back. I think it's something that deserves to be revised. It's a part of the game that has probably been untouched since the days when it wasn't even an RPI. Why does attacking somebody leave you unable to act again for like ten seconds? If you initiate combat, they can flee at minimal risk and difficulty, and run halfway across Allanak or the Red Desert before you can begin to give chase.
This leads players to seek out other ways to kill, and these ways tend to be a lot less palatable. The one-shot backstab, the heramide arrow, the apartment tango, the hopeless execution in a jail cell. People know that this is how you actually land a kill, so they plan with that in mind and even make race, class and role choices that accomodate it. A disproportinate number of murders are carried out in one of these few repetitive ways.
It would be a lot more interesting to lose a character in a hard-fought battle to the death where you actually have time to emote, and perhaps to understand the reason, than just getting the old "someone stabs you, your vision goes black. Mantishead." It's a souring experience and something that gets overused, because if you're making a character that you think might have reasons to PK, you're compelled to make it a character that can do something like that. And then once you've finally got that character with master backstab or whatever, it's tempting to look for ways to use it, sometimes a little too frivolously.
Various other MUDs have had no such instakill trump cards, instead it took time to flee. I've had a lot of great fights in games running the RPI Codebase where there's no such thing as backstab or poisons or nonsensical stun damage with clubs. There were plenty of deaths but they usually involved an actual fight, and I think it made for a better and more dynamic PvP environment. It creates a less all-or-nothing scale of character deadliness. On Armageddon, it's too often a binary question of "have you got heramide/backstab/god-strength or are you not dangerous?"
There are certainly times when a quick and dirty kill has its place and I'm not advocating for the removal of those abilities, but I think it's unhealthy when it becomes the go-to method. The fight to the death is underused on Armageddon because it isn't very viable, and I think it could be made viable with a revision of combat delays and the instant nature of flee. Fleeing is just too easy.