Greg Tito said:
I shot a guy I saw a fancy "+3 XP" number pop up. The soldier's special ability is to provide ammunition to teammates who may be running low and when I tossed them more clips, I got more than 3,000 XP. That's quite a difference.
I played a couple rounds of the demo at PAX as well and just wanted to post to clarify this bit of the review here, everything else is spot on. The XP disparity isn't that excessive. Here are some of the values...
- kills seem to be 40xp or so but they are broken down on a % damage basis so if you do half the damage you get half the xp, no kill points/assist points.
- healing (medic), buffing damage (engineer), hacking comms* (operative), and giving out ammo (soldier) give +75xp each and all use up chunks of energy that comes from a power bar on the bottom left of the UI. It regenerates at a reasonable rate but you just can't spam these "powers". The length of the power bar may be player size related too, like the health, but I am not sure.
- the 3,000 xp number probably came from the right of the screen where it keeps a running tally of your XP for the whole match
*if you down an enemy as an Operative you can run up and scan them which will hack their communications and show everyone on the other team on all of your minimap and the maps of all your allies for a short time.
Any way you look at it the name of this game will be teamwork as whether you just really want your team to win or you are just trying to farm XP the smart move is to work together.