Lol man you must have didn't play in early 99 when everyone KS'd each other left and right and would create wizards/mages and run them to the location they wanted to camp and log them in to KS whoever was there, haha....people were more ruthless in classic than here on P99.

Heck yea people cared about hybrids being in group in classic. Heck a halfling warrior can level to 60 two times by the time a troll SK reaches level 59. Hybrid exp penalties just destroyed group exp and people knew it and never invited Paladins/SKs unless they were farming an item (like Ykeshas).

The few hybrids the servers had back then were carried by their non-hybrid friends who had to eat their exp penalties, lol.

I was there back in 1999 and I can tell you, that the people I rolled with, never even mentioned experience penalties. I was also here when Blue launched back in 2009, and again, not one mention of an experience penalty.

Thats a good point. If a group had an SK and a Paladin are the XP penalties cummulative?

Or is it just applied once?

Is the SK and the Paladin fun to group with?

That's my criteria for inviting someone to a group.

Yeah i wasn't debating politics of grouping etc. It was purely a statistical question.

XP is split based on a ratio of your xp point total to the entire group total. If all 3 of you just dinged level X and you group together, and you have 10000 xp, the 2 hybrids have 14000 xp to get to the same level. Your share of xp gain from the kill is Y * (10000/38000) and each of theirs is Y * (14000/38000). That's not accounting for racial penalties, ZEM, group bonuses, and a bit simplified, but that's the gist of it.

Not many people knew xp penalties were shared with the group for the first year or so... it wasn't until Verant explained how it worked that hybrids got shunned, if I recall correctly.

Unless they were running packet sniffers with a friend and comparing XP numbers gained, it woukd have been difficult to measure. All we had was an xp bar moving pixel by pixel to measure anything, no XP percents built into UIs or anything like that... I don't even remember if the blue XP bar that measure progress within an orange bubble of XP is classic.

IIRC the blue bar was added during Kunark because people complained they couldn't see any movement in the 50s hell levels.

Those were good times, while grinding out spiders in velks for 12 hours it gave you something new to look at :D

All you need to do is group 2 fresh warriors and count the number of giant rats you kill to get level 2 and then group a fresh warrior and hybrid and count the number of rats to get level 2. The warrior and hybrid simply needed more rats each than the two warriors. By level 5 or 6 you could see the disparity fairly easily. That kind of testing could be done in a single evening.

While the actual exp numbers were not well known, simple testing could show something was up with the way exp was reduced to non-hybrid group members easily and is was somewhat common knowledge fairly early on, I remember it well leveling in Lower guk a bit before Kunark or my move to Lanys in Dec 99. I definitely encountered more and more hybrid bias and groups wanting to skip pal/rng/shd as much as possible as time went on (bards seemed to get a bit more of a pass, manasong is a helluva drug). Sure, not everyone knew exactly how it worked, but the idea wasn't some obscure thing, people knew something was up even if they couldn't explain it in a full technical sense.