Notice how I mentioned that changes happened between 1999 and 2001? Did those changes justify their statements in the producers letter in regards to the removal of class experience penalties? Might it have been true at one time that hybrids WERE overpowered? If so, they were being deceptive about it. But more than that, the fact that they saw an experience penalty as an effective balancing mechanism gives us a clue that they really never knew what they were doing. But, what happened after 2001? Read on...
They removed racial experience penalties on Sep 19 2006. If they removed the racial experience penalty in 2006, then what was their reasoning for doing so? Because we have an example here from around the 2000-01 timeframe where they justify racial experience penalties. What happened between 2000-01 and 2006 to change their mind? What I get from it is that they felt the faction penalties justified the bonuses for evil races. That is, in part, why they removed the experience penalty. But I'm not sure what the rest of the reasoning is.
Before 2006, they also removed some of the other restrictions on evil races. I think they removed the no-plate armor restriction for Iksars during Velious. Iksars, originally, could only trade in Cabillis. When POP came out they could trade in POK. Their reasoning for removing these (and maybe others) may or may not be similar.
But this also highlights that Sony is a company that doesn't really know how to do it right the first time. One year, they'll think one thing, the next, another. It's good to change when you need to: success is built on making mistakes. But if that becomes a habit then maybe you're making too many mistakes?
But I do think the whole culture of EQ changed too. Generally, the game got sour and old. It started to feel like Microsoft Windows does. Bloated, a bit. One size fits all kind of feeling from it. I think the biggest thing was that they started moving their funding from EQ to EQ2 and to other games on their roster. This starved EQ of development resources. Just compare the number of zones in Kunark or Velious to later expansions.
I'm not going to pretend. A lot of the changes did not agree with me. For example, I hated POK. POK felt like Walmart to me and still does. Defiant Armor and Old Man Mckenzie were just blatant mediocre excuses to level up low(er) level players. You could see this in a myriad of different things. Sony was not conspicuous about it. They had a warped sense of confidence. The quality of the game went down. Instead of giving players fun and expansive content, they'd just recycle some sh** and make an instance mission and have the players do it a couple hundred times. Instances avoided the overpopulation problem that open world zones have. What it amounts to is this: the changes they made reduced their development costs. Money was the driving force. They wanted to level up players, but they didn't have the money to do it RIGHT. That's the heart of it.
Compare the content in EQ1 to EQ2. EQ2 has GOOD instances. EQ2 has a million things that EQ1 does not. By all accounts, EQ2 is a better game, right now and has been for the past several years. My point is that they shifted resources from EQ to other games. This, ultimately, made EQ a mediocre game doomed to die.
The game that EQ became is nothing like hte game was between 1999 and 2001. The game in the old days was a world. There were many homecities and factions. There were boats and many zones and activity was everywhere. It requires a lot of money to keep it like that. Things felt whole. But as the years drifted by, EQ became like an old boat that no longer has a caretaker or somebody to maintain it. The boards started to rot. The sails were tearing. The crew were tired and not satisfied. The boat started to take on water. The crew grew anxious. But what could they do? The boat is adrift at sea. They stuck with it, vainly. And as all things seem to go, it will eventually sink to the bottom of the abyss, to be buried and someday forgotten.
EQ might have survived had they invested in it instead. But EQ would have changed from what it was in 1999. Unless you want to be a museum, you have to keep up with the modern world. Thus, with something like EQ, you have to upgrade it. They - vainly - tried to do this. But without the funding, it's futile. There was too much to change, and not enough time to do a good job with the changes that they did manage to produce.
What does all this amount to? Well, first off, Verant/Sony, at one time, thought experience penalties were acceptable as a balancing mechanism. Second, we know they have changed/patched the game over and over, year after year. Third, we know that they often retract on past statements or design decisions and do a turnaround. Lastly, we know that they're not resistant to shifting money from one game to another, even if it dooms the outlook of said game. All in all, take it, mix it, let it sit for a while and heat for 15 min. Eat.
Here are the patch notes for the removal of racial experience penalties:
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/story.html?story=7973