Controversy
The Vex Thal zone led to a great deal of controversy due to complaints that the zone did not work properly at release, that its design created too many conflicts between players (due to racing for content), that the quest to access the zone was a time sink (requiring weeks), and that the zone was designed with encounters requiring long periods of playing (more than 6 hours, for example).
The Shadows of Luclin also had problems on release that prevented many players from experiencing the new content immediately, due to the changing graphical engine. Additionally, the Bazaar, a zone that was listed in the expansion's features, was not ready on the expansion's release date and was made available a few months later.
In the end, the expansion was described by some as an unfinished product: time sinks, unfinished and broken content, unfinished and broken software, and very little in the way of role playing and folklore.
The new skins given to player characters were evenly rejected and accepted by the player community. Today, a large portion of players still use the old (original) character skins.
In addition, Shadows of Luclin began the trend of instant teleportation in Everquest with the addition of the Nexus, which allowed people to transport from various spires in the original Norrath up to Luclin. This trend was later expanded on with the Planes of Power expansion, which added the Plane of Knowledge and "PoK books" that allowed teleportation to nearly every newbie zone in Norrath, "boat gnomes"--teleporters that replaced the original boats, and the Magi that allowed transport between Wayfarer's camps in the Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion. Such changes are widely believed to have trivialized travel in the once enormous world of Norrath, which in effect made the world seem significantly smaller.
The Bazaar, a trading zone which in essence allowed player characters to act as NPC merchants, is also credited with causing massive "mudflation" and damage to both the in-game economy and to the social networking and role-playing that often occurred in player-run bazaar areas such as the North Freeport Bank or the East Commonlands tunnel, where characters had previously congregated to buy and sell goods with all the efficiency of a third-world city market.
Read more about this topic: EverQuest: The Shadows Of Luclin
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)