It tried to turn what was already established as a Guild v. Guild/Realm v. Realm v. Realm PvP game into a PvE focused "raiding"/"epic" questing/etc. game.
Essentially, SOE had released Planes of Power the year before. Mythic saw how successful it was, and then said to their devs, "Hey, let's try to do that but make it fit our game's "lore"!". It was the complete wrong direction to take the game at the time. They could've stuck a lot of that loot on the World/Realm dragons instead, or even just added yet another "world"-type loot pinata with similar drops - similar to the dragons they already had in each realm.
Instead, they tried to shoehorn in a bunch of PvE shit that the largely PvP focused community had no interest in and hated. Not to mention, it was a bug ridden mess at release. A lot of the encounters sucked, wouldn't give credit/flags, gave credit to people in groups not raids, etc. Hell, I went back to play DAoC for a nostalgia hit like 4 or 5 years ago and some of the encounters/quests are STILL bugged and require weird workarounds.