I guess I'm curious as to why they deceived the playerbase on this. They didn't even acknowledge this issue until they got called on it. Even then it took 3-100+ page posts to get a response and a pretty poor one at that. This is not the way to build players trust.
I played beta with forced AA, shadows, high textures, etc....everything maxed with no fps issues and there seemed to be alot more visiable players then. I'm thinking most hardcore gamers are in the same boat in that we build our own machines and know the capabilities of them. We know how to adjust game settings to get the best visuals and yet maintain the 30+fps we shoot for. Even if we want to crank visuals and run a slideshow, that should be our choice to make.....shouldn't it?
We bought the game and/or upgraded our machines to play it based off our beta experience and the visuals advertised and yet now they are not available, because we as players if given that option will only complain the game won't run well, not realizing it's because of our graphics settings? Give us a little credit, for most of us this is not our first PC or MMO game.
I played EQ2 for 7 years and they have always had some of the most intense graphics options available from beta. I only just recently was able to play that with max settings, but it took a 4.5ghz 2600k, 8 gigs of 1600, and a 560Ti. I always had all the graphics options to choose from though and because of this and tweaking I knew exactly how far I could push them depending on my hardware.