My understanding is that they removed the class penalties since they determined that class penalties were silly (something we'd been telling them for years). They didn't remove the class bonuses because they were minor (5%), and would constitute a "nerf" (as Joph's quote shows).
Racial penalties and bonuses are still in effect since (again as the quote shows) the advantages based on race do apply across the board. Iksar inate AC/Regen is a straight advantage. Troll regen is a straight advantage. Ogre unstunability is a straight advantage. Barbs only get better stats then other races, which is minor, but so is the Barb penalty.
No one really knows why halflings get a racial bonus. I tend to agree that they intended to give humans the bonus due to their relative mediocrity, but someone made a coding error and gave it to halflings instead and no one ever wanted to fix it.
The class penalties (not just hybrid) were fixed by giving them an offsetting bonus to exp gained when killing a mob. They did this because the penalties/bonuses were not multiples to exp gained. They actually set different exp amounts needed for each level. I used to know the formula for this, but have since forgotten it (Something like 100*C*R*(L^3) where C is class mod (9.5 to 14), R is racial mod (.95 to 1.2), and L is current level). Ok. Maybe I didn't totally forget it...
In any case, the calculations affected the exp needed to gain each level. It would have been really really difficult to adjust those formula since it would essentially give some classes a bunch of levels all at once (you'd have more exp then needed for your current level with the new formula). They didn't want to change anyone's level or current progress through a given level, so they chose to keep the formula intact (so I believe it's still working) but just adjust the future exp gain to account for it. So a hybrid would multiply his share of the exp by 1.4 to account for the increased amount he needs to gain a level. The end result means that hybrids gain more exp per kill, but need an exactly proportional amount more exp to gain their next level. In terms of relative exp (tics/bubbles), they'll gain the same amount as any other class of the same race and level.
They avoided the exp soaking problem by changing how they divided exp up in a group. Originally, what they'd do is take the amount each character in a group needed to gain the next level and divide the exp up in proportion to those values. So a higher level character would get more of the exp (cause he'd presumably need more exp to gain the next level, right?). The problem was that a hybrid would take 40% more exp then anyone else, even if everything else was equal purely because he needed that much more exp. So in groups, hybrid penalies were offset somewhat but at the expense of other groupmembers (which hurt hybrids because people were hestitant to bring them along since they would gain exp slower as a result).
What they did was change the group exp splitting formula to only take into account relative level and nothing else. First they multiply the exp the mob gives by the group and zone bonuses. Then they divide based on relative level (using a "straight" formula that does not take class/race into account). Each character then gets his exp. That value is then multiplied by an amount to counter that characters class exp penalty and that character gets that much exp. So now, even though a hybrid is getting more exp per kill (but needs more), that exp is not being taken from the group. It's being generated on the fly (it's free!). It works out pretty well even if it is a bit whacky...
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King Nobby wrote:
More words please