mkint
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Posted - 2011.04.21 23:13:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Lost Greybeard
Originally by: Mister Rocknrolla
CCP should forever program to the least capable computer that logs into it? Forever?
One of the major upsides of MMOs in general is low (comparatively) system requirements, they have to be compatible with basically any computer a person might reasonably using. Basically, they should still be thinking in terms of 5-year-old average hardware -- no one should ever have to upgrade to continue playing an MMO... if our entertainment budget for the month is like 15$, requiring 1500$ purchases of us would be the financial equivalent of the CEO making a batch of cyanide punch and having the whole company down a cup ritualistically.
That said, I haven't seen anything from Incarna so far that a 10-year-old machine couldn't handle, much less a 5-year-old one. They seem to be pretty safe on the vast majority of the userbase finding the content accessible.
This.
I am one of those people on a 5 year old machine (early 64 bit AMD.) I'm on a 2 year old video card ($100 card at the time.) I fall well within the "minimum requirements" for EVE, but over the past year I notice a significant decrease in performance quality with every single patch with absolutely zero gameplay enhancements to justify it. Client-side performance for EVE has never been worse. However, from reading the test server forums it sounds like some of the UI is being reworked to perform better (which is seriously the only thing in EVE I'm currently looking forward to.)
I know CQ on duality is still a work in progress, but right now loading with high shaders (as the devblog said is required right now) takes me 15 minutes or so. And even then I've got the bug where my avatar does not load, so I can't even use any of the CQ interface. If there was an option for "prompt on docking" I would probably sometimes go into the CQ if I planned on sticking around docked for a while, but I would prefer it didn't.
Since loading CQ takes so incredibly long, I've had the chance to notice that the old background loads anyway and it loads CQ on top of it. I would think it should be a simple matter of a "load environment" switch to make CQ optional.
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