[Foodstamp]

Yeah, this issue has really wrecked the community. I mean something like 3 whole people used the spell in MP games. Most (Really "most" is not even a strong enough word to describe it) of the pissing and moaning came from people who had never even faced the spell in MP.

A bunch of people listened to these people and the way they said the spell worked, they tried the spell in SP and omg the AI could not cope with it. Must be an exploit.

As far as this making the game more conventional, in a way it does. As a small aside, I felt like the "Voice of Tiamat" thing runs along this same ilk.

Some says "OMG voice of Tiamat can be used to make a check against a dome spell".

Rather than say "Cool, this is a neat little trick water casters can do." people said "OMG HAX exploits, the spell should logically work like this, not like that. If this were HOMM34304 the spell would not do that."

So the spell is changed. 6 months later the people who complain about these things leave to go play Spore, Civilization, or something else because they are tired of having to point out things that need to be fixed in this bizarre game. And then the players who love the quirkiness of the game are still here dealing with a vanilla game that has been drastically altered by a group of people who are never satisfied until they think everything is perfectly balanced, generic and expected.