Personally, I think (and I think that everyone agrees to a degree) that the leveling system is pretty broken. The basic problem to me seems to be the concept of XP in the game.
Practice points are gained by practicing the skill in questions, they allow people to get stonger in that particular skill.
XP is gained by killing monsters, it is used to 'buy' theoretical knowlege from NPC trainers.
XP in essence is simply the limiting factor that is designed to limit the speed at which people get stronger. Call it the growth potential. This is like saying that you cannot become a master swordsman in 3 days, even if you practice constantly for 72 hours straight. Eventually something runs out and you cannot gain skill from that practice anymore. (in RL it would be that your collapse from exaustion, or your mental willpower runs out, you lose interest, or your brain 'fries' from the constant learning)
The problem is that in PS you get a virtually unlimited amount of XP from killing monsters or doing some other repetable activity.
To put this in an RL example... suppose you wanted to be a master swordsman. You need to practice to do this but it takes a lot of practice and you can't do it all in one go because you will 'burn out' and have to stop to rest eventually. But if you got a 'magic treadmill' that costs you absolutly nothing to maintain or operate, but while you run on it it can drain away all the fatigue, satisfy all hunger, and get you all set to get practicing again.
The result, a person with a 'magic treadmill that eliminates all fatigue' could practice swordplay for hours, run on his treadmill to remove his fatigue, and then quickly go back to practicing again. If he works had enough, he could probably cram in more practice into 3 days than many people can work into 3 weeks. You can get almost anything done if you can get rid of the need to eat, drink, play, and socialise.
Essentially, getting XP from killing monsters (while practice points are gained from performing actions) is like a treadmill that you use to eliminate all need to do anything other than practice. Its very boring and pretty unrealistic.
Anyway, possible sollutions to fix the leveling system.
1. limit the amount of XP you can 'store up' at a time so that once you save up an amount (like 100 XP or so) you simply don't gain any more until you spend that on something. This would discourage spawn camping for long periods of time... but would still be a pain if the XP cost to level skills remained so insanely high.
2. create an item that gives a set amount of XP for its consumption (such as a potion, a fruit, or a book that vanishes once read). If it can be bought for tria than it could very well be gained by people with money-making skills instead of monster-killing skills. If it can be mixed through a potion-making skill then it will encourage the learning of that skill and the aquisitian of the items used to make it. If it can be a reward given out for Good Roleplay then it could help those who would rather Roleplay than sit around killing monsters. It would turn XP from a 'free' item you gain by camping into a comodity with value.
3. Have 'XP' be automatically given out for a period of time that PlaneShift is played by non-afk people. For example, when you are in the game you may get a set amount of XP every 5 minutes or so. If you don't make any user-input from the keyboard or mouse then your character 'falls asleep' and does not get any XP for being awake. This would pretty much just reward people for logging on and doing things, if no other way was given for gaining XP then the most powerful people would be those who spend lots of time in PS... assuming they use the XP to train and practice skills with.
Personally, I would like to see the introduiction of potions that give XP for drinking them. make the potion ingredients be various items from around Planeshift that have to be gathered together. It could create a pretty decent economy with different people gathering different things, alchemists mixing them into potions and then selling them to people. It would turn the 'powerleving by killing monsters over and over' into 'powerleveling by gathering items, trading, and working with other players'
And before potion making comes out have an NPC merchant sell them, could provide a decent investment for people with massive amounts of tria they don't use.
As for the actual topic about people exploiting bugs to gain XP while AFK: I would suggest the idea that was proposed in this thread about having people who where AFK for while (say 5 or 10 minutes) have their character fall asleep or something. Then while asleep they cannot auto-defend and if they are next to an agressive monster they get killed. If AFK for an hour then the game automatically logs off and shuts down... possibly leaving a message saying "You have been Disconneted from PlaneShift because to seem to have been away from the keyboard for more that 60 minutes".
Or something like that.
