The changes were unintentional - I got into them after the crash on 9/2. There was an uninitialized variable in there that caused the crash so I initialized it and tried to clean up the rest of the code. Obviously that didn't work well. The only difference right now is that the variable is now initialized.
I know people are still seeing lower numbers - can you give me some examples of old versus new and which continent you're on? I suspect everyone was benefitting from the uninitialized variable and getting continental xp bonuses all the time but I'm not sure. Let me know.