no, its only been that way since WoW went after the simpleton market and made a game any idiot could play and run it on an abacus. before then MMOs were pushing limits as much as any other game. UO had decent graphics for its day, as did EQ1 and WWIIonline. infact WWIIonline did it all on one open world server with no loading or zoning or instances with a full ballistic physics model which has still not been improved upon by any game since. games used to be designed with the future in mind, but since WoW and Xboxs because the benchmark games have been made so they'll run on commodore 64s.

I think its also a shame that really the graphics are letting all the effort that went into voice acting down. There is a good story in there, all voice acted, but much of the textures look worse then some other MMOs, much less better single player/non-mmo games.

People jumped all over me in beta for saying essentially the same thing. the fanbois were going on about how the gfx were all "turned down" for beta and how they'd be awesome on release, I said that it wouldn't happen and now we see who was right. Its a shame since the current texture res doesn't even push 4 year old hardware much less anything newer.

noU. .

also either they can handle the number of people who bought the game, or they can't. letting them in slowly isn't going to somehow mean you can fit more onto a server. they know exactly how many EGA codes are in the system, they know exactly how many people they can fit on a server before it hits the "full" population status. so just bring up the correct amount of servers and let people play. its a simple equation. EGA codes registered divided by the max population on a server = number of servers required. It really is that simple. same on launch day. just replace EGA codes with retail game codes.

Because now you get to wait on the forums instead of at the server select screen! despite almost all the servers being marked as light population. yeah Mr Reid, waiting on the forum is way better then server queues. FYI, in RIFT I had a total wait time of 7 mins, since I chose not to queue for a server that was overpopulated and the RIFT team were bringing new servers up as others filled. so yeah, 7 min wait Vs ... well no one really knows since it all seems to be arbitrary yet not being communicated.