[YendorLootmonkey]

Here's the deal.

Having the hybrids penalize the groups with their penalty WAS classic.

However, once players determined this was happening, the cat was out of the bag and, because grouping favored the holy trinity and made it already hard enough for hybrids to get groups, Sony had to correct it in order not to alienate a large portion of their playerbase from being able to get groups, and thus in most cases, being able to play the game.

However, you can't un-know what is already known. Knowing that the hybrid penalty also impacts the group, the stigma of having a hybrid in your group happens MUCH EARLIER in the timeline, and therefore is not classic. Since you can not make everyone conveniently forget this occurred, the only way to keep things classic is to stop penalizing the group with each member's individual class/race penalty or however they fixed it.

For example, in classic, a hybrid could get a group without too much difficulty because no one knew that their 40% or whatever penalty was impacting the group. On this server, we knew this from the start, and the hybrid has a significantly more difficult time getting a group because of it. So how is that classic? Add to the fact that we don't have the population of the Live servers back in the 1999-2000 timeframe, so you're making it even harder for hybrids to be accepted into groups, when grouping opportunities are already sparse as it is.

Correcting this would be similar to fixing various exploits/pathing bugs/etc RIGHT NOW before they were actually corrected in the original timeline. I don't have any particular examples of this, but of course no one would knowingly let something that is detrimental to the health of the server go on just for the sake of "following the timeline", right?