Everquest 2 was a decent study in such things as well on the Nagafen server. Initially was good vs evil, and the class limits were imposed and enforced. After or around Kingdom of Sky it became a G v N v E setup that resulted in much lolz as the Neutral faction took over the server with their superior "All classes here" setup.
Raiding with "Good" guilds and you lost Bruisers / Defilers / SK's or whatever. Evil raiding guilds lost their counterparts. No idea if the devs ever actually gave a thought to balancing the classes with that in mind as the server was such a small subset of the overall game, but it was possible and likely resulted in some ingenuity and creativity on the larger guilds who still got it done. I'm not trying to directly compare this with that because EQ2 obviously has a much more spread out class structure and lots of overlapping skills between Good/Evil type classes that EQ certainly does not have in this era.
Finally they decided to implement a third faction, "Exiled" which consisted of removing all the benefits and "safety" of a real city, and throwing you into a hole under Nektulos that contained the bare essential merchants / tradeskill shit, and making it so the rest of the world hates you. The sole saving grace of the Exiled faction aside from making you feel cool was that you could have any class/race combo in the game, in your raiding guild. What happened? Come Kingdom of Sky expansion, the top Good guild and a top Evil guild rolled into this new "Neutral" Faction, merged, had much class sex, and basically took a shit on the rest of the server. For a while we were server firsting raid targets while simultaneously pvping a rival guild.
Moral of the story? Give everyone a choice between SemiGimped Faction A, SemiGmped Faction B, or Everything Faction C, and the hardcore of the server roll with Everything Faction C, min/max to the max, , and profit.
I believe, but I could be wrong, that EQ2 solved the issue by letting everyone make any race/class combo within reason(To give each faction access to each class) and not adhere to the traditional setup that is just not viable in a PvP environment.
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