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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.