I am about to reach level 50 for my first character. I'm a little hesistant about the pvp aspect of the game once lvl 50 is reached. How brutal are the players when it comes to general pvp? Will I be killed instantly when I reach a combat zone?

Yes.

No, open world pvp is not as current as it was in the past. You most likely will not see anyone killing another player. Only if you start griefing on grind spots it might happen without warning.

If you're on the Arsha server, the odds of you being killed if you run into someone else when grinding are very high, because there are no PvP penalties on that server, and for whatever reason, people there love to be jerks.

However, on a normal server, you're generally not going to be killed by other players. Occasionally, you'll get a jerk who decides that they don't care about going red if they see anyone near where they're grinding, and they'll kill you. And for stuff like fishing events, some players love to kill anyone outside of a safe zone. Similarly, occasionally, players will be jerks to players training horses outside of safe zones and will kill them. So, odds are that you will occasionally be killed by someone with no warning. And if you're in a guild, and you're at war with another guild, then odds are that the other guild will treat it as open season and kill you on sight. However, for the most part, the only open world PvP you're going to run into is going to involve someone asking you to duel over a grinding spot. And on the rare occasion that someone's a jerk, you can usually just go somewhere else or swap servers and avoid the problem.

Ultimately though, you can't really play this game under level 50. You can have characters do specific life skilling tasks at lower levels (like cooking or fishing or whatnot), and that can be useful for avoiding other players who want to be jerks, but for actual combat, you need to be a higher level. You're not going to do much grinding with a character under level 50. So, you pretty much have to go past level 50 and deal with the PvP. If it turns out that it's minimal enough to be fine for you, then great. You can enjoy the game. But if it's too much for you, then you should just go play a different game, because it's simply too limiting to try to do combat-related stuff long term and be under level 50. I expect that you'll be fine, but really, you just have to do it and see how it goes.

PvP death is indeed nothing. That is until you start getting fed to NPCs for the giggles.

As long as you don't go to the profitable grind zones. You will not likely be PKed. However soon as you start grinding at zones that are profittable. Those chances go up quite a bit.

If you do have issues with being PKed. Or even losing progress, because some other player thought it funny to feed you to NPCs. Then BDO is more than likely not the game that you'll enjoy.

Everyone on the forums will exaggerate about PKERS" but the reality is I can count on both hands the number of times I was "forced" to pvp in 6 months. You can also move to servers that see nearly NO pvp - for example if you're NA don't be on Cal-2 if you want to avoid all world PVP.

Then again, it is an open world PVP game so I'd assume you've accepted that and want to work towards progressing your character.

I've leveled many 61s and farmed lots of SP and had no forced interaction, but even if I did that's what can happen and what you should accept can happen.

In fact, it's people who DON'T PK being the worst griefers. Since PA is doing their best to punish world PVP people now can just drop in a rotation, even stack on your gather and gather in your face. If you flag, you'll lose karma+time, and soon even DECing won't be viable.

What's worse is if someone is griefing you horribly and you flag as the only measures--because server swapping just tells everyone this behavior is acceptable and wins--they will be able to one day use the "Sheriff" system to send peopel to kill you.

So don't worry, PA is removing PVP and you have nothing to worry about unless you reach high end organized PVP. You don't lose crystals, you don't lose XP. The only thing that can happen that is you are mob fed but that will requires top end zones and by then you should have gear and knowlewdge to avoid that - even something as simple as hitting "V" and swapping servers. This is ultra rare occurance usually done if YOU are the one being toxic. In my whole BDO life I've only had 2 people try to mob feed me for no reason.

In my experience, it's happened quite often.  At grind spots or even just innocently auto-pathing somewhere on the horse.  The latter, maybe even more often, since I don't grind much outside of season servers these days.

You don't lose anything, so not really anything to be too concerned about other than the inconvenience.  In the case of getting killed while auto-pathing, there's the inconvenience of having to recover the horse from the nearest stable which costs a recovery fee, so you can lose a negligible amount of silver in that case.

No one was ever able to successfully feed me to mobs though.  My gear was always too weak and they'd one-hit kill me, lol.  Not that it's a big deal if that were to happen, they're pretty good about giving away plenty of Elion's tears.

I would not worry about getting killed out of the blue too much when out and about. I bought Black Desert back in late 2018 and been playing off and on since then. I can use one hand to count the times I been ganked by a player. Those few times I been killed was cause of people who thought they are entilted to the area I was in at the time. 

Another words just keep playing and don't worry about it too much. Just don't be that player which thinks they are entilted to everything under the sun. Cause that will be one sure way to get your self killed.