Is Backing-Up Chars Duping?

[Rejections]

Two friends of mine are trying to decide if Backing-up is a way or cheating. One of them is, one of them isn't. It isn't really duping because your loading your character from the previous game, just as you would in SP. But also, it wasn't really intended for the game itself. So the 3 of us are trying to figure it out. And I wanted to hear it from multiple people. Any thoughts?