Somebody said earlier that this game is a bit more Dino friendly than Firan, and I just wanted to add my two cents to that... Firan was ruled by dinos that nobody could touch because they would just trample all over you. I played for 5 years, and was in the top xp earners list more often than not, funneling xp from my two alts to one just to try to catch up, and I still couldn't touch them.
This is because Firan had 1 vote = 1 xp. There was no tax, and so everybody was moving along, acquiring skills at the same rate as everybody else, so it didn't matter if you started a week ago or have been playing since the beginning, you were on the same level as everybody else, and you weren't about to catch up to the dinos. Except for maybe the fact that they likely weren't really raising too many skills at the end.
Here, you have the reduced returns, which I hated at first, but have come to appreciate. I'm rarely on the top twenty here, but I'm usually only a point or two behind, so, I'll take it. The longer you're around the harder it gets to raise skills, so it'll always be possible to catch up to a dino, or at least close the gap significantly. Being around longer will always present advantages, and I think that's honestly fair enough, and here I think they've done a great job fixing most if not all of the areas that Firan fell flat in.
Although. I hope that they look to the Firan damage system for inspiration when redesigning the combat. That's easily somewhere I feel was awesomely put together, and I'm not crazy about how damage currently works, though we're still beta, so I expect there to be a lot of changes.