Never subscribe to an out-of-town paper...

[Bob Schroeck]

...they take forever to reach you.

-- Bob
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...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[Rev Dark]

Thanks for the copy!
(I will be adding something in near future to this...)

[Bob Schroeck]

No problem at all.
-- Bob
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...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[Rev Dark]

www.magma.ca/~revdark/coh...-atlas.jpg

[Acyl]

I...I just noticed this...

The gall! The sheer unmitigated gall!
Are they suggesting that Bella was PL'd?!
WE SHOULD SUE!
-- Acyl

[Bob Schroeck]

Huh? I'm missing something.
-- Bob
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...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

[Foxboy]

A bridge is a person who assists with power-leveling.
Usually, a pl team is eight-man. One 50, three 47's and 4 lowbies. The fifty runs through a mish on high difficulty, while the 47's sit at the entrance with their sidekicks. The mission is also commonly a Kill-badge farming expedition.
The bridges are the 47's, who allow the PL'ed toons to get the most experience for the mish. This term would also apply to the person 4 levels above the lowest in the party who exemps a higher-level toon for the mish.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[Logan Darklighter]

It's a joke based on past poor behavior by power levelers.

Back when Tanks were "teh uber", and could basically pull an entire MAP of mobs without worrying too much about damage, there were a few specific high level missions that power levelers would do. One of them was where you arrested Dreck, the leader of the Freakshow, who had found an alternate universe of his own by hijacking a portal.
So you go to this alternate universe, and it's basically the humoungus "Boomtown with water" map. The place is huge. And if you got together 8 heroes, and the mission was set to a high difficulty level, the place would be crawling with Freakshow cybergangers. Hundreds of them.
Here's how the "farming" worked. You'd get a group together consisting of a High level tanker. Invulnerabilty was a popular one. The Dreck mission was available at 45+, so the Tank would be level 50.
Then you'd have whoever wanted to be Powerleveled. This could be up to 3 people at a time. Yes, you could take a level 1 person into a Portal mission. (getting them there with recall friend or group teleport.)
Now, the people being powerleveled needed to be sidekicked. Now you did not actually use someone who is the level of the mission. You'd use someone about 3-5 levels lower than the level of the mission. Someone in the 42-47 range. The reason for this is that the XP is outrageously good for mobs defeated or mission bonus enemies being defeated by your team are much higher level than you. But if you tried sidekicking the lowbie directly to the tank, neither of them would see as much bonus.
So you have your 3 lowbies, sidekicked to your 3 higher level people. Then you have your tank. You may also have a blaster type who is high level as well. Someone with a highly damaging AOE like Nova or something. Or you might have a second tank. An invulnerability tank for drawing all the aggro and a fire tank for doing damage in an area of effect was a popular combination.
The mid level mentors in this equation were called "Bridges".
So your three lowbies and your 3 Bridges all wait at the mission entrance while the aggro Tank goes and runs around the entire map aggroing as many Freakshow as possible. Typically gathering them all in one spot for either slow roasting by the fire tank or Novaed by the blaster. Since mobs have no collision with each other, a popular tactic was to gather them all inside an open trash bin or boxcar. Often you could have upwards of 50-60 Freakshow at once crammed into this boxcar when the AOE went off.
The tank-tank or tank-blaster combo does all the work, and the others just sit back at the entrance. Typically AFK while the XP and the levels build.
And then they took care NOT to finish the mission, but to abandon it and reset it for another go.
Wash, rinse, repeat. This was powerleveling, ro "farming the mission".
You could powerlevel a PC from level 1 to level 50 in this manner in the course of several hours.
I, and many others, looked upon such exploitation with disdain. Sure, I could see some VERY limited cases where the game itself caused people to do this. The old dry spot between levels 37 and 41 or so, when for some reason all your contacts run out of missions for you, and won't give you any new ones or new contacts, was a big justification for it.
But basically, you're skipping all the content of the game for... what, exactly? Just to have a level 50? once you're level 50, the game is essentially over, storywise. You're missing the entire point that way. Unless all you want is a PVP toon and you don't want to work hard to get it.
Something for essentially nothing. A free lunch. No consequences. No time put in. No dues paid. And you often wound up with someone who had a high level toon and no clue how to use it the powers. Imagine a totally incompetent level 50 who is stumbling around like a level one.
That was the view of many against the powerlevelers.
The Devs didn't like it either. Want to know a big reason for many of the MASSIVE nerfs that took place in Issue 5?
Powerleveling, plain and simple.
The devs made it so that it would be MUCH harder, if not near impossible, to use these tactics. In addition to which, they put the infamous Dreck mission on a timer. So you HAVE to finish it or fail it. No in-betweens. You cannot abandon it.
So now you know what a bridge is, and why it's considered such an insult to be accused of powerleveling.-Logan
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"This kind of thing tends invariably to devolve into the kind of "No, Nakajima, THIS is true power!!" argument that only really works if you're yelling it from the cockpit of a giant robot . . ."
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[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, I've heard of this behavior and the methods -- I just didn't know of the terminology. And "power levelling" didn't occur to me when I saw "PL'ed".
Thanks for the explanations!
-- Bob
---------
...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...