It has been made abundantly clear in the past:
Howland If you are subdualed, it is considered bad form to get up immediately and continue attacking your opponent unless given OOC permission to do so or the PvP conflict is over.
ExileStrife When used in pvp, most, if not all DMs consider subduing someone to being akin to taking someone out in that particular instance. It provides an oppertunity to keep interacting with someone after they're beaten, instead of sending them straight to the Fugue and calling it quits. It would have taken the same effort just to FD and have no interaction after the pvp conflict. When you get subdualed in pvp, you're "out," even if you've received healing (idealy you shouldn't heal subdued PCs, but that's pretty much impossible to enforce).
Howland I'm not sure why you think it's all right to stay down with NPCs and not with PCs, given that NPC death isn't generally perma-death but PC death often is. Presumably in both situation there's the same principle that you -would- be beaten, but the other player on the other side of the screen wants to continue the conflict or something else. I had thought our policy on this was really clear (if you are subdued, you should remain down until the conflict is over) but apparently it wasn't so we'll be taking steps to make it more clear.
ExileStrife "Knocking them out" is one of the valid interpretations for subduing someone, but it carries the universal context with it: you lost your fight and you're as good as dead. It does not mean get healed and flee or fight again. It's true, to kill someone you have to switch to FD eventually, but we like seeing "GOOD RP OPPORTUNITIES" as much as possible, and the subdual mode facilitates this as best it can. I've seen a lot of interesting things happen while subdued, and a lot fewer with people getting up, running off, forming a gank squad, and coming back to kill their agressor on FD without any interaction.At this point, without a perfect scripted solution, it's a courtesy to the winner of the fight to stay down and prepare to accept what they have planned for you because you weren't just killed outright. We don't want to have to enforce this all the time, because more things are usually happening during these kind of situations.
("You," as in anyone who's face down on the ground)
And on lots of other occasions.
Read the rules and play by them, please. People breaking PvP rules will be addressed especially sternly by us- not because we are tyrants, but because we don't like to see OOC headaches, hurt player feelings and dints in the awesome.