Duration of Shared Grp XP Penalties

[Braveguard]

I played a paladin on Mith Marr at release. It was only a couple of months before we realized I was leveling slower (regular group). It was maybe a few months after that when some of the more anal players parsed it out by playing comparisons and found that the exp penalties were fact. The GMs remained silent and the official response was "working as intended". It was sometime around the release of Kunark when they finally admitted to everything officially with the exp penalties for class and the reason that came through the grapevine was really irritating for those of us who played through it... they considered it to be too hard to adjust.

Originally, class penalties were instated as the downside to playing a hybrid. In the case of a paladin, you were a warrior with spellcasting abilities. They based a lot of this on traditional pen and paper methods. Unfortunately, they forgot to account for the fact that, given a choice, people would much rather take the time to level a stronger character than get a gimper character faster. The exp coding was all in place though when they realized this fact and they didn't want to be bothered with fixing it. So... they nerf the hybrid abilities to "fix" the disparity in power but didn't bother taking the penalty away.

Of course, this was never an official statement but the fact that they removed it with the reworked Kunark code seems to lend a lot of weight to it. Why take the penalty away if it wasn't a mistake.

Yes, the class penalties are "classic" but they were not good game design... simply the easiest path for the developers.