For events such as the gates event, you often see a combination of Musketeers using gravity orb and then rangers melting mobs with fire rain, shamans with totems. However, if you are a class without a stable AoE attack (Scoundrel, Bard, Runemage to an extent, or have someone blocking your shots by moving in front of you), then you lose out on that event participation and any exp from those mobs. Or if the enemies spawn in small enough groups, sometimes a Runemage or two will spam cast them to death before other players can reach them (again, denying participation credit and exp to other players).
For events such as the portal crystal toss or the fish toss, if another player grabs the crystal even a moment before you, you don’t get the credit for that crystal. (Based on a player getting bronze while the player that kept taking their crystals (somewhat on purpose from what I saw) obtained gold).
In dungeons (specifically no shard and low shard), if a runemage spam casts and kills the enemies before the other players can even reach the enemies, the other players do not get the experience (especially true for bards, which have limited ability to attack/heal at will, and shamans, which have limited ability to attack at long range at will). This both denies the other players both ‘real life experience’ and ‘in-game experience’ and encourages bad plays for the sake of getting a hit in.
So one proposal for events that require mob kills, have overkill health for mobs. For those who haven’t played games with overkill health, basically one form of it is that once the mob dies, you have x seconds to do damage to the mob for extra rewards (in this case, rewards for those that weren’t able to do damage otherwise).
A second proposal is that for events, allow for aoe participation for anyone that is not afk. In other words, they need to have displayed signs of attempting to participate (attempting to attack a mob, attempting to grab a crystal, etc.)
For dungeons/parties, give exp to any party members moving towards the mobs and/or actively buffing the damage dealer. Basically, accept buffs as part of the damage being dealt instead of having it count only for the participant, which would allow classes such as bard to gain credit for buff application, and accept attempted participation as participation. While this won’t help with the issue of high level players denying ‘real life experience’, at least the players being denied will receive ‘in-game experience’.
One problem with my suggestion is that it could be somewhat abused depending on implementation (leechers, players faking activity with rubber bands (though that could be somewhat detected)) and another problem is that it would make it harder to detect desyncs.