many people have been complaining about your lack of use of the high res textures first seen in trailers, cinematics and even beta gameplay. the developers response was:
In comparison to single player games and other genres of multiplayer online games, MMOs have much higher variability in the number of characters that can be potentially rendered on-screen at the same time. In MMOs, even though most of the time you'll see a relatively small number of characters on screen, there are certain situations in which many more characters will be seen. Some examples of these situations include popular gathering places in-game (in our case, the two fleets), Operations with large teams, and Warzones. In those scenarios the client (and your PC) has to work hard to show off a lot of characters on-screen.
This is completely understandable as I have noticed myself that while I can run smoothly at max settings in game, in a pvp situation i lag up even when latency is decent and even when switched to the lowest graphical settings the same thing happens which means that it is actually the time taken to render frm reading the hard disk and extrapolating the data. I see two solutions to the individual user: buy a SSD to speed up read rates, have the game installed on a large enough flash media device OR the developer recodes the game to store more of these testures in the RAM. However the main problem for this is that even though some users may have powerful systems with multiple drives, latency optimised RAM and multi GPUs, it is not realiztic to change the entire engine to cater to these few and as a result make the game unplayable by the many, ie gamebreaking lag or increased RAM requirements.
So here is a simple suggestion. The one thing that is constant in the game no matter where you go and what i believe most people will end up caring about the most is: their own character being played. It would not be that hard at all to modify the engine code so that ONLY the players character is rendered in high resolution textures. since the character is always loaded it will not affect loading times or gameplay and will drastically improve the gameplay expectations being met for all those complaining. Bioware, why dont you simply incorporate a setting to use high res textures for the players character..? It seems to melike this would be a very simple solution that does not affect the existing player base negatively, addressing the concerns of those complaining and keeping the game playable and enjoyable for all.
Please leave your comments so that Bioware takes notice. This is a great game with alot of potential and will get better if we give actual gameplay based advice instead of just complaining all the time.