So if someone robs you saying "get into prone and drop all your items or I'll shoot" is there any real reason to comply? Do you keep anything across characters besides gear? Seem like getting completely robbed and getting killed are identical.
At the moment there's nothing to really incentivize complying, but as a captor you do have a very clear incentive to not harm your target because you'll destroy their stuff. Currently that doesnt mean much since most ruined gear or gear of any status doesn't mean anything right now, but once it does you'll have a clear and very important reason to no just shoot a target willy nilly. Knee capping and head shots will be very important if you want to actually take anything from them.
In terms of making players feel the need to surrender and comply that's a lot harder, they're going to lose their stuff no matter what so they might as well make the person fight for it and likely ruin it in the process.
If they really want to get players to care about their actual character and not just the gear on them they'll have to introduce some kind of character progression or identity to help attach players to the actual character. But the trouble is to make most people care would likely require a pretty robust system that has significant impact on the actual game, which many people don't want, and anything that is simply flavor like character backgrounds, ingame journals etc, won't be enough to sway the vast majority of players into actually caring about their character.
It may be in the future that when spawn diversity is increased and spawn ratios have been tweaked a lot, and most likely dialed down a lot, it will be in your interest to comply because starting completely fresh will much more of a bother than losing half or even 3/4 of your stuff. Then again that may work in just the opposite way because the robber may then be even more inclined to take everything you have since everything may be harder to come by.