Wait, what?

This has basically been happening since the game started. Player A (lowbie) gives Player B (Farmer) x amount of influence for farming them. It generally depends on a few things:
Experience of Farmer
Greed of Farmer
Demand for PL (if no one is looking price tends to be lower)
Amount being farmed (ambush farm versus a longer cave farm for example).
Some farmers will farm from x level to x level for a certain price while others are a set price based on the map.

You will see a lot of people go on and on and on about how evil PLing is, but I say to each their own...it is after all your toon and your money (inf). No one is being taken advantage of imo when it comes to farming... the farmer provides a service and gets something out of it (inf) and as the "customer" you are free to either take part or not.

I do not pay for farms; friends and I trade off farming each other for free.

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

Not to mention getting both parties banned if they get caught doing it.

Exchanging anything with another player for real money is against the Terms of Service, and is one of the few offenses that will get you permanently banned.

In the simplest terms, it is because you are selling something that does not belong to you. You can sell it for influence, because the influence doesn't belong to you either, but the second real money is involved you are committing fraud.

That's why the devs here (and in other games) are trying to stamp out RMT sites. The RMT sites are making money off of something they have no legal right to be selling.

You want to sell something in-game for influence? Go for it, that's what influence is for. But don't get your PayPal account involved.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Are you paying in ?

As Burnt said PLing in one form or another has been around since .. well probably day Two. It's hanged some since the old days due to the changes in Mentoring/exemplaring. Years ago a Farm would have 3-4 players actually defeating mobs while a couple Mentors babysat the low levels at the door. Thing was in those days those low levels were actually getting XP like they were 49 levels and INF and everthing else.. Now a one level can join a 50 level team and be raised to a 49 level but they still earn XP like they were battling 1 level foes. The huge advantage is team size and level of mobs. These days you can play at +4 X8 and grab a LOT more XP/INF/etc than back in the old days and even set the mission to add extra bosses or whatever. PL in th AE building and you could be running missions with nothing less than a lieutenant in sight.

Persoannly I rarely ever farm and the few times I have over the years I was to finish off a level before heading to bed or when there just wasn't anyone doing anything else. Between Task Forces and Trials I can level fast enough I see no real reason to run in circles doing the same thing again and again. But as I always say as long as you aren't violating the TOS .. there is no right or wrong way to play the game. If you prefer to farm.. have fun.

Nnnnoooo.... unless this happened sometime in the first year and a half of the game, by the time I got here (I6) that was definitely not the case. You got rewards based on your security/threat level, not your combat level.

However, you could be -5 to the team leader, with enemies up to +3 to the team leader, so potentially getting rewards based on enemies +8 to your level. This is what the bridges were: level 46 characters sidekicking lowbies so that they were 45.

(This used to be 'within 5 levels of the team average' so you could be even lower with deliberate manipulation of the teaming mechanic. This was changed to 'within 5 levels of the team leader'. Then super sidekicking came in, so everyone on the team was sidekicked to the mission holder and bridging became moot.)

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Remember the whining about THAT? For God's sake, people had Incarnate Nature Affinity characters within hours of the powerset being released, and yet some people back in the day were "quite put out" about losing bridging (because they'd lose the falsely-inflated exp reward).

I dunno, just does. Personally I figured it would be better to be in one of those "I'll level you, then you level me then we're even" arrangements.

Even better still was having a bunch of friends with level 50's who enjoyed running missions on "Unyielding" or "Invincible" back in the day and bringing my lowbie and leveling rapidly, then becoming one of those 50's and returning the favor. (And now we can just do the same thing on +something/x8 even if we don't have a full team!)

Having fun with friends and leveling quickly as a side effect seems more enjoyable to me than doorsitting or running the same old farm over and over, but there's a lot of different ways to have fun here, which explains why the game's still going strong after eight years.