Camelot Grab Bag Q&A

Mythic's Sanya Thomas has once again posted her weekly Grab Bag Q&A on the Camelot Herald, this time addressing questions about recent bannings, monster aggro, and more. Here's a taste:
Q: When me and a group of friends are doing Catacombs instances, it says the instance bonus is at 75% (I think with 6 people). However, it only gives us 45% exp bonus.

We tried this in different instances: We tried Jarlsburg Hideout. Only 45%. We tried the first instance in Vendo, and it still only gave us 45% instance bonus. I was wondering why this is not giving us the full 75% bonus.

A: Everything seemed to check out fine when we investigated this as a bug, so we went back to good ol' Code Ed for some clarification. It turns out to be a misunderstanding: "When you get a print of:

"You get 17,500 experience points. (7,500 instance bonus)"

the 17,500 already has the bonus contained in it. The 7,500 instance bonus was added to the 10,000 base xp. It is not added to the 17,500. The same applies to group bonus. Bonuses that print in subsequent lines are based off this modified xp and are added to it. Thus if you had a 5% bonus from an artifact, you would get a subsequent line of:

"You earn 875 bonus experience from your artifact!" (which is 5% of the modded 17,500 xp, not the base 10,000xp)

Due to this misunderstanding the above example of a 75% instance bonus will be incorrectly calculated as a ~43% instance bonus."