Is PLing a Form of Cheating?
By
Agrippa_CoH,
Posted on: 2004-09-09 12:12 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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What if I found a hack for the game and just logged in at 50? Would that be right? I don't think that it would. Like I said the spirit of the game is that we are all playing together. So, its not true that everyone is playing individually. Also, if I can observe your behavior you are part of my world. This is why people can't have sex in public. Sure they are doing it together, but I have to watch. Frankly, I don't want to.
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Oh for the love of Gosh!
Now you are just reaching for straws. If any kind of hack like that ever showed up i would bet money that it would get squashed FAST! No one could keep somehting like that secret for long. And even if they did, how would it damage you and your character, in even the smallest way?
As for people having sex in public, no you dont have to watch. No one is putting a gun to yoru head and making you look at it. On the same level, no one is MAkING you stand there and look at a guy being PLed. You are in NO WAY being forced to observe my behavior, in no way at all. Unless of course some kind of demented moral crusade you want to undertake overides your nervous system and makes you freeze in your tracks every time you catch a glimpse of anything that offends your tender sensabilities and stare at it for hours on end like some sort of twisted Pavlovian experiment.
Bottom line is your skin appears to be WAY too thin for you to be on the Internet. I would sincerely suggest you toughen up your hide a few orders of magnitude and come back and find that its all really ok.
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it doesnt negatively impact your ability to play your character in the slighest.
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That's all there is to say on the subject. Besides jealousy, there's really no reason for you to care.
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I love this philosophy! We should apply it to real life too. Someone just robbed a convenience store? Who cares? Doesn't affect me. Someone is lying about disability just to collect $$. Who cares? Doesn't affect me. He's right, people are just jealous that the criminal who held up the store got lots of money.
Live and let live. Each person should be allowed to enjoy the game in their own way as long as they are not infringing upon the rights of others. This in no way prevents you from playing your own style. If the Devs want to do something about this they can easily put a grouping level range in the game and then you would have to SK someone and keep them within 200 ft for the SK to get xp. Until the devs change the system it is a perfectly legitamate way of xping.
I personally would rather earn the levels, but I do not care what others do.
PLing is not cheating by any means. It is merely helping someone of a lower level gain experience faster.
By definition, powerleveling is not cheating or exploiting.
There is nothing fradulent or dishonest about it.
There are no rules that say a player must actually 'assist' in defeating mobs to gain XP from them.
If I team with an equal level empathy defender on my regen scrapper and that defender doesn't use thier blasts yet still gets XP, is that cheating?
If a teammate has to go AFK for 5 minutes, would it be cheating if they got XP while they were afk?
If one of my SG mates is depressed with thier Mind Controller and wants to play a hero that doesn't suck, am I cheating if I help them powerlevel a scrapper up where they can team with us without a SK?
Comparing powerleveling to commiting a crime in real life is crackpot logic.
I have yet to see anyone come up with any logical argument against powerleveling.
Envy is not a valid argument.
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The kind of Pling I hate is when people are just standing there. Its fine and even fun to have an sk or be sked. That's part of the game.
One day I encountered someone that was using other people's accounts to level them because they gave him money to do so. There's not much you can do about that but I bet the developers could do something about characters standing still and earning hundreds of thousands of points.
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But why? because it bothers YOU? It's not a horribly efficient way to level. It does allow people to catch up to their friends. It's not cheating unless they state in the TOS that it's cheating. Right now, it's only "cheating" because YOU say that it is. That doesn't hold much water.
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Comparing powerleveling to commiting a crime in real life is crackpot logic.
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You have to read between the lines of what I said. My mistake with the post above is not spelling everything out...
The game world is a microcosim of the real world. There are rules of conduct, do's and do nots. If PLing was ok, the devs would not go out of their way to write in code that makes it hard (or at times impossible) to do. If PLing was ok, then a SK would earn the same XP and the master. If PLing was ok there would be no level difference required for a team to earn xp.
Different people might have different ideas about what PLing is. I define PLing as occuring between a hero and another hero who is 10 or more levels above him. If my 31 Blaster teams with a 25 defender, that is not PLing (not to me anyway). However, if my 31 Blaster is seeking ways for a level 1 character to gain xp then I'm PLing.
To me PLing occurs outside of the rules of the game. It looks for loopholes, exploits and bugs in order for a high level to earn xp for a much lower level hero.
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I love this philosophy! We should apply it to real life too. Someone just robbed a convenience store? Who cares? Doesn't affect me. Someone is lying about disability just to collect $$. Who cares? Doesn't affect me. He's right, people are just jealous that the criminal who held up the store got lots of money.
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Apples and oranges. People are being hurt or otherwise negatively affected in those situations. Nobody is hurt by powerlevelers.
A more accurate scenario would be a person bumming a ride from a friend. He's not driving himself, but if his/her friend wants to use their gas to help them get around, then why should you care?
It is a FORM of cheating, yes. As basically the game was designed to have a character beat enemies, do missions, and go up levels. Basically, that IS the whole game.
Now, in order to make it so that the above mentioned fighting enemies and gaining xp works, even in certain situations (like one member chases after an enemy that ran and gets far away from the group), the code needed to be put in that allowed any member of a team to be anywhere in the zone and still get xp.
IMHO, playing the game in a way other than that intended by the devs in a form of cheating. They didn't put that code in there in order to allow people to powerlevel. They probably weren't thinking of powerleveling at all when they designed the game, other than to say "Well, this is going to happen, and if we try to stop it, it will only make the game worse for those who don't powerlevel".
You are right that it doesn't DIRECTLY affect me. However, it does indirectly affect me. When, say, everyone who is my level is powerlevelling, and I am unable to find a group, and I am a group support class who doesn't solo well, then it does affect me. If I am also unable to experience a TF because I cannot find enough people to meet the minimum requirements due to everyone PLing instead of grouping, it does affect me. It also affects me if a large number of people are all PLing and the devs decide that all new content should be level 40+ because that's what level the majority of players are, when I and all of my friends who play the game play it normally and are all 25th (just examples, not actual numbers).
I play the game to play with other people. I want to group every time I log on. If there is no one for me to play with, I will likely quit the game. I've found that in other games, PLing starts a cycle of PLing. Because there are a few loud complainers who PLed to 50 quickly and are complaining that there is nothing to do at 50, the devs say "Alright, there aren't very many people at level 50, but if it has started now, there soon will be. We should fix this before too many people get there". So, they start adding level 50 content, and it causes a lot of low level people who wouldn't have considered PLing to say "I WANT that stuff they added at level 50. I want it badly, and my PLing friend got there already. Screw it, I'll let him PL me to his level." So, with all the people PLing, there becomes less and less people actually playing the game normally as without groups, each person resorts to PLing more and more to get to where the majority of players are still playing (at high levels).
So, anyone who decides to start a new character because they actually WANT to play the game from the beginning again is screwed because of PLing.
Don't believe me? It has happened to other games already.
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I love this philosophy! We should apply it to real life too. Someone just robbed a convenience store? Who cares? Doesn't affect me. Someone is lying about disability just to collect $$. Who cares? Doesn't affect me. He's right, people are just jealous that the criminal who held up the store got lots of money.
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Apples and oranges. People are being hurt or otherwise negatively affected in those situations. Nobody is hurt by powerlevelers.
A more accurate scenario would be a person bumming a ride from a friend. He's not driving himself, but if his/her friend wants to use their gas to help them get around, then why should you care?
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Should lying about disability be allowed? How does it hurt anyone? Government coffers are so big that it has no impact and hurts no one.
PLing affects the bottom line. It artificially inflates numbers on the reports the developers run about the game. If there was a sudden influx of PLing the devs would get false (or at least skewed) numbers on leveling speed and the number of players at x level.
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If PLing was ok, the devs would not go out of their way to write in code that makes it hard (or at times impossible) to do. If PLing was ok, then a SK would earn the same XP and the master. If PLing was ok there would be no level difference required for a team to earn xp.
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All of these are good points, but they do not exactly imply that the devs are against powerleveling. If you use that logic, then it's just as easy to counter-argue that if the devs wanted us to level at all, they wouldn't have put code in the game to make the bad guys resist our attempts to arrest them.
I think they just don't want to make powerleveling TOO easy to do. Just like they don't want to make it TOO easy to level normally. Now, whether or not you think that powerleveling is currently too easy to do is another story. I personally have no problem with it, if that's how they have fun then who am I to say they are wrong?
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Should lying about disability be allowed? How does it hurt anyone? Government coffers are so big that it has no impact and hurts no one.
PLing affects the bottom line. It artificially inflates numbers on the reports the developers run about the game. If there was a sudden influx of PLing the devs would get false (or at least skewed) numbers on leveling speed and the number of players at x level.
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Another good point, but since I don't know the methods the devs use to mine data about leveling trends, I just assume that they have ways to weed out extreme cases like powerlevelers and I don't worry too much about it. In the end, I prefer to just focus on what's fun for me and leave the rest in the devs hands.
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If PLing was ok, the devs would not go out of their way to write in code that makes it hard (or at times impossible) to do. If PLing was ok, then a SK would earn the same XP and the master. If PLing was ok there would be no level difference required for a team to earn xp.
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Once again, you are using faulty logic and reasoning.
Nowhere has any dev stated that they disprove of powerleveling.
If the developers wanted to stop the type of powerleveling that you personally disprove of, they would implement a distance range for XP that would require players to be within a pre-defined physical range from where the mobs are being defeated.
The powerleveling that you personally disprove of is players simply using the current ruleset for maximum XP gain.
There is no exploit, it is not difficult, it harms nobody and does not infringe on anyone elses fun.
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To me PLing occurs outside of the rules of the game. It looks for loopholes, exploits and bugs in order for a high level to earn xp for a much lower level hero.
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The powerleveling that you disprove of uses the existing 'xp level range' and 'sidekick' rules to gain maximum XP.
What loophole, exploit or bug is being used to do this?
If a level 36 player teams with a level 31 who has a level 5 sidekicked to level 30, the level 5 hero will gain equal XP to defeating level 10 mobs.
The XP gain will be no different than if they teamed with a level 10.
How is that cheating?
In a way PLing is cheating Cryptic out of its revenues. The MMORPG business model is bsed on players taking X amount of time to gain Y amount of reward. PLing decreases the time/reward ratio, so the player who PLs ends up quitting the game sooner as they run out of content faster than a regular player. Thus undermining the company's bottom line. Cyptic could easily implement a system of no exp if it was a problem. Simply giving people levels after X amount of played time whether theyre standing around or fighting crime or RPing or whatever. Could even give you a countdown clock showing how long 'till your next ding. But I'll bet a lot of PLs are just honest casual players trying to keep up with their powergamer friends. If it was a big deal Cryptic would fix it.
To all:
I don't think it's cheating, I think it's boring. A little powerlovin here and there I don't think anyone minds, but soaring through every level, rarely playing, doesn't seem very productive to me. There's more to this game than mere XP. Well, to most people.
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I think that PLing is a kind of bug in the game.
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it's fixed on test. you cant do the PLing trick (your mentor not being in your team, yaddi yadda) for massive xp.
(mentor/sidekick have to be in the same team)
regards,
Liam
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But I'll bet a lot of PLs are just honest casual players trying to keep up with their powergamer friends.
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More accurately, powerlevelers seem to mostly be players with high level heroes who are throughly bored with the lower level content (1-25).
Personally, I've taken 10+ Heroes over level 20 and low level missions and teams just frustrate me.
I'd love to be able to start a new hero at level 20 (or at least level 14).
I seriously doubt the devs mine 'powerset popularity' and 'played time vs level' data.
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it doesnt negatively impact your ability to play your character in the slighest.
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That's all there is to say on the subject. Besides jealousy, there's really no reason for you to care.
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I love this philosophy! We should apply it to real life too. Someone just robbed a convenience store? Who cares? Doesn't affect me. Someone is lying about disability just to collect $$. Who cares? Doesn't affect me. He's right, people are just jealous that the criminal who held up the store got lots of money.
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Hoping you're joking, but I fear not, so...
In case of robbering or taking other people's money by trick, that behaviour DAMAGE someone. even if a politician lies on a thing that doesn't touch you directly, someone is indeed affected by that lie and so is right for your to act to avoid it.
In the case of someone PLing, he doesn't damage noone unless this, as previously mentioned, doesn't make the devs think something is wrong and they change something that make other players' life harder or less fun. Just obtaining lvl 50 before you doesn't damage you NOR ANYBODY ELSE. I can easily say that this just damage the PLer, 'cause he/she is jumping over a lot of gameplay along with nice people(like most of the ones I've teamed up often), and the (for me) pure joy of discovering one by one how the new gained powers works, how can I combine with my other powers, how they interact with other toons' powers, and so on...HE is the only one who get damaged, not you, not anybody else. If you would have take a year top reach lvl 50, you still will take a year to do so, not a year and a day. Same for the others. So, please, if you have to object, try using something serious as an example... 
Powerleveling is pure manipulation of loopholes in the game experience mechanics to get large amounts of XP for little or no risk.
There is no denying this. It is an exploit, pure and simple.
The intention of the game is that you go out and beat up bad guys to advance. There is NO way you can legitimately justify being able to just stand around in a train station doing nothing and gain XP.
Personally, I would alter the mechanics so you do NOT earn ANY XP unless you are in a minimum range of the bad guy you are getting XP from, and thus risk getting defeated by them.
You want reward? You have to accept risk. Period.
-np
I see myself as witty, urbane, highly talented, hugely successful with a keen sense of style. Plus of course my own special brand of modesty.
Virtue: Automatic Lenin | The Pink Guy | Superpowered | Guardia | Guardia Prime | Ultrapowered
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I have had two amusing encounters with people PLing. The first one was when I encountered some people doing it (they were sitting on the Brick station) and they denied that they were. Then, the one guy suddenly levels! He didn't know what to say!
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Heh, that's pretty funny.
What I have found is that usually, people being PLed are on their third or fourth character at the least, and simply want to skip the lower levels and join their friends or super group with a new archetype. And their friends and super group have no objections to obliging them.
I think that it is easy to assume that a person being PLed is completely new to the game and just decided that they'd beg and plead their way to 30 or 40 or 50 instead of 'earning' it. They don't have to do the hard work, they just sit there and presto, they are level X.
If you consider it as the second case, then it seems very galling to think that while you are grinding away at the levels, some beggar shoots past you without lifting a finger. But if you look at it more like the first case, it doesn't seem so bad. It isn't someone trying to cheat his way ahead of you so he can mock your low level self. It's just someone who has friends who are PLing him so he can join them without SKing him.
It doesn't bother me, the only person who is being cheated is the person being PLed, unless they've been through those levels so often that they'd rather skip them. Since CoH doesn't really have an end-game, the journey is the main thing. Skipping the journey to get to the end is like reading the last 5 pages of a really great novel. You find out what happened, but you didn't get the enjoyment of reading the whole thing.
To each his own, though, and it doesn't affect me. So I don't worry about it.
Is PLing a Form of Cheating? No.
Why?
Because one of the main facts that has been omitted from every person complaining about people PLing is that there usually is a high level person involved. Thats right. Someone who has levelled a character to a high enough level to be able to PL another character.
Wait, I already can hear you saying "But that high level character was probably PL'ed by someone else!". Well, that could possibly be true in some cases, but in the end somewhere along the line someone used a legitamately levelled character to level another character via existing game mechanics (not exploiting).
So if thats the case, what is the real problem here? I think it has more to do with the fact that people don't like seeing others achieve something via a means, or at a rate, that they cannot. This dates back to when we first started to see higher level characters on our servers. When the first lvl 40s started appearing (prior to level cap being raised), there were a lot of posts complaining about "Person X exploited to lvl 40", and "Person Y doesnt have a life". Fact remains that people level at different rates. Some people put a lot of time into this game to level high level characters, and I think its sour grapes to suggest that they are "cheating" when they use their characters, or their friends characters, or their Supergroups characters to level up alts.
I'm not advocating that its a good thing to stand around broadcasting "I NEED PL MAEN!!" every 10 seconds. However, I don't see anyone here complaining about the constant "lvl XX Portal group forming - need healers / blasters / etc" spam that permeates Bricks and Peregrine Broadcast and Request channels. Is grouping in a mission with unlimited mob spawn, and constant free flowing / low risk exp cheating? No.
If someone wants to say that PLing is against the "spirit" of the game, or that its unethical etc - well, that will remain an issue of personal interpretation. I agree that PL'ing shouldn't have a negative impact on the casual gamer, and I would be suprised that Cryptic are taking that view. If anything, they realise that PLing is in actual fact a source of revenue for them, due to the extra accounts being used by people, and that it's keeping a reasonable percentage of their player base still playing the game.
Lastly, this game above most other games should be applauded for the fact that there is NO End Game. Thats right folks, you can basically play this game and experience all the good and bad of it from level 1. What do you think happens when you reach level 50? You get a badge? Its about the journey folks, and believe me you will enjoy your own journey a lot more if you pay more attention to what your character, and friends are doing, than what someone else is doing.
Remember, they raised the cap from 40-50 ages ago. Thats because they knew how many level 40 characters already existed. And that was LONG before PLing even became fasionable. Did some of them exploit to get there? Undoubtably! Did some of them level to 40 legitimately? Most Defiantely.
Disclaimer - This is only my opinion and should be acknowledged / dismissed accordingly 
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Hoping you're joking, but I fear not, so...
In case of robbering or taking other people's money by trick, that behaviour DAMAGE someone. even if a politician lies on a thing that doesn't touch you directly, someone is indeed affected by that lie and so is right for your to act to avoid it.
In the case of someone PLing, he doesn't damage noone unless this, as previously mentioned, doesn't make the devs think something is wrong and they change something that make other players' life harder or less fun. Just obtaining lvl 50 before you doesn't damage you NOR ANYBODY ELSE. I can easily say that this just damage the PLer, 'cause he/she is jumping over a lot of gameplay along with nice people(like most of the ones I've teamed up often), and the (for me) pure joy of discovering one by one how the new gained powers works, how can I combine with my other powers, how they interact with other toons' powers, and so on...HE is the only one who get damaged, not you, not anybody else. If you would have take a year top reach lvl 50, you still will take a year to do so, not a year and a day. Same for the others. So, please, if you have to object, try using something serious as an example...
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Sheesh, seems a lot of peoples interpetitive skills are in need of work. I was speaking of the principle, I wasn't being literal. As many have said, PLing is bending the rules, looking for loopholes or outright exploiting. It is something that is outside of conduct that is considered acceptable. Thus my example.
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Powerleveling is pure manipulation of loopholes in the game experience mechanics to get large amounts of XP for little or no risk.
There is no denying this. It is an exploit, pure and simple.
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I agree with this in cases where a bug is being used, such as the mentor/sidekick not being on the same team. However, I don't agree that sidekicking someone in such a way that they gain the maximum exp possible (making them the lowest level they can be while still getting exp) is exploiting.
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The intention of the game is that you go out and beat up bad guys to advance. There is NO way you can legitimately justify being able to just stand around in a train station doing nothing and gain XP.
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I don't like to say there's NO way, I feel like I should be able to let my lower level friends take a break from the grind and do some of the work for them occasionally, should I choose to do so. If i want to shoulder some of their burden to help them out that's my choice.
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Personally, I would alter the mechanics so you do NOT earn ANY XP unless you are in a minimum range of the bad guy you are getting XP from, and thus risk getting defeated by them.
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I like this idea. It still allows people to help their friends out, but it also makes sense from a RP point of view. It's like the sidekick has to follow the mentor around and observe his/her techniques. And it clears up all the people standing around doing nothing at the train stations. It could still be done with no risk (or, very little risk) using stealth powers, but at least the person would be doing *something* and not standing around. And maybe some of the people who have a problem with seeing people leveling at the train stations would be satisfied as well.
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Powerleveling is pure manipulation of loopholes in the game experience mechanics to get large amounts of XP for little or no risk.
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There is 'risk' (no matter how small)for the person/people that are fighting the mobs.
How is it different than teaming with a -9 level hero on my scrapper and fighting blues?
The risk is minimal to nil for my scrapper and my teammate is racking in truckloads of XP.
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There is no denying this. It is an exploit, pure and simple.
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By definition, an exploit in a MMOG is the act of taking advatage of a flaw in existing game mechanics to gain an unfair advantage over other players.
Powerleveling does not fit that definition.
Players still have to defeat mobs to gain XP.
They are simply using the existing XP level range to maximise their XP per mob.
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Personally, I would alter the mechanics so you do NOT earn ANY XP unless you are in a minimum range of the bad guy you are getting XP from, and thus risk getting defeated by them.
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You see, that is you personal opinion.
If the developers shared that opinion, I'm sure they would implement a change like that.
Since they haven't, and since no developer has stated that 'afk powerleveling' is cheating or exploiting, this whole discussion is moot.
To the OP, yadayadayada.....
sorry but how people get their levels is of no concern to me.
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my only problem with powerleveling is that it throws off the real figures. then after making the data bunk by having someone else crazy pl them to at least a point where their archtype has some real powers and abilities ..... and then saying the game is too easy.
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Now THIS I do agree with. It skews the numbers and makes datamining less accurate.