I've got differences in xp between the 4 characters in the thousands. Not a fan if it's intentional.

If a character died, and then you did something to get XP (kill enemy for example), the dead character does not get that XP.

None died

Main: 34980
Others:
31580
31380
30740

I've no idea if the main one missed any xp

Also this is dumb, and always will be

I don't think you miss out on experience if you die in combat (I still got the experience pop ups when I was dead while my friend was killing Orivand and his posse) but I really hate the fact that me and my friend's exp totals just leapfrog each others. I think I have mentioned this in another post about exp but if this is because of competitive questing I really don't agree with this. My friend and I are playing Co-operatively and want to be at the same level. Fair enough if one of us left the party to pursue our own agenda but even then I think competitive questing rewards should be purely materialistic (like gold and skill books, because you can still choose to divvy up the goods if you feel like it, giving you options).

Also I have noticed even in single player the experience is off. One example is when you escape the Fort Joy complex, your main character gets a CHUNK of exp (somewhere around 3.2k I think) and your companions get zip all. In this situation I couldn't help but think "This is single player, no multiplayer connection enabled, I keep all my party together so why have they got different totals"

I just started a new co-op game today with a friend to try out the new changes from the latest patch. We noticed fairly soon that both of us get exp from discovering and killing things but with questing it's somewhat weird now from before. Only the party who speaks to the npc to finish a quest, gets the exp reward. I was controlling two characters and my friend two others and we tested it with different quests too, also changing the one who did the speaking. It turns into a really big exp difference between us, especially with the more important quest lines that yield high amounts of exp at once. We play as a team for common goals and were always standing near the quest npcs and not wandering off, if it would have something to do with questing separately far from each other.

Don't know if there are other possible reasons for difference in exp amounts, this is just something I noticed in today's playtime.

There 'group' quests and individual quests, they distincted by group in the quest log. Later ones only give exp to one quest doer it seems.

I agree that the XP rewards are inconsistent and should be changed. We were doing the Withermore's Jar quest, had shared the journal entry and done everything together. Both of us participated in the final conversation where the XP reward was given, but only the person who initiated the conversation and their controlled companion got XP. There is no good reason to do this purposefully so I hope it gets fixed.

The main problem is, that they try to put competative play into the game. Don't think a teambased CRPG is good for something like that. In competative does will win, who just know the 'quest' best or can run faster. Also fights will kind of force you to cooperate again and again anyway. I'm not even sure, how the vircor of competative would be decided, just to kill the other at the end would be kind of strange?

Completely agree here. Generally people are playing as a team and are performing the quests together. Quests which arbitrarily only reward one participant are very off-putting.
This always leads to the point halfway through the island where my wife or brother ask me why I'm a higher level than them and proceed to interrogate me on where I'm hoarding all the extra XP.

I've got some explanation here :
http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=602063

Bassically the pb isn't in combat but in discovery exp, you will earn this exp with all your "chained characters" and if you play with a friend he wont recive the exp until he goes there too.

That why we all comes to have some exp variations. Well wil this in mind it's nicer

Hope this helped ^^

Lich