DX11 - Why were our expectations so high?

I guess they are working on their technology debt which appears to be quite substantial.
This should at term allow them to develop content more easily, once that is stable.
This does not look massive but 64 bit migration was quite meaningful as it improve the server side greatly by allowing much more memory.
Everquest technology looks to gradually and incrementally get to a point were it becomes easier to maintain.

That stated it was because DX12 had a smaller level of support than DX11 did which means the change would have impacted more players.

Good thing they went for low impact.

The game feels bad. Personally, I care much less about how it looks than how it feels. Dropping frames, graphics lag, less responsive input etc are excessive. I have 6 computers, 5 dedicated to Everquest with varying specs as far as power. They all feel really bad regardless of in-game settings. The computer you wouldnt expect to preform the best (based of hardware) preforms the best (still not good or at an acceptable level). My high end gaming PC preforms the worst and, after hours of adjusting settings and trying half-baked workarounds, is nearly unusable.

A noted benefit of modernizing the game and updating UI and DX was to make a better first impression on new players that might be turned off by the dated elements. Nobody new is going to log into a janky, stuttering, unresponsive mess and stick around to give it a chance.

Same reason they didn't cut off windows 7. Soo many people use 15yr old computers. You think the howling is bad now? What if they required everyone to use something modern.

Not changing and support going away for DX9 would be a better choice?

Would that support be needed ? DX9 does get used since about 20 years.

The expectations was pretty low. I think most are just glad Direct X11 was rolled out. I think few long term players expected a smooth rollout.

It was impossible for Daybreak to know in advance how many issues would crop up.

I do expect a high probability of an emergency patch at some point. But Daybreak should wait until they can rollout several fixes at once.

No doubt the programmers are putting in more hours than they care for.

Why did they make all these changes. These are way too steep for the vast majority of players and no real reason.

They recommend a minimum of 256MB of RAM, but with that amount you'll only be able to load up half of the new character models. If you want the best performance out of the game, you'll need 512MB RAM and, at the very least, a GeForce 2 or compliant card.

Why drop 95 support for DX8.1? Seriously? 95 isn't even that old!

I mean serious, with this rollout i'll never play this game again. I have to buy an entirely new card.

So DB is getting far more blame than they deserve. Its litreally impossble to test every hardware combination out there. There are thousands upon thousands. Its just not feasible for even a AAA company to do. And those companies don't care about ancient hardware either.

DB is trying to support ultra cheap chinese knockoff stuff made 20 years ago still running windows 7. Many of these problems stem from a combination of that and total lack of hardware/driver updates as well. These are not DB problems, they are user issues that DB is getting blamed for. There is no company in the world that can do what people are expecting here.

The easy/logical solution is modern hardware. EQ should just stop supporting anything pre-windows 10.
I do wonder how many of the ancient computers for EQ are used for ftp boxes, so not generating profit anyways.

It is true that there are a few people complaining their computers are no longer supported, so hopefully this is directed at those limited cases.

But the VAST majority of people in this thread and in other places are complaining not about the upgrade, but how it rolled out. They would be fine with the change, if it didn't make the game harder to see or harder to get running.

I think it's really cool that people on the forums are working hard to help their fellow players alter their Windows installs to get their games running. But they shouldn't have to do it. Darkpaw was under no immediate rush to make this live. Let newer cards emulate DX9 with some performance hits while you get a tested and stable DX11 port done.

I'm sure there are new issues that pushing to live made obvious, but a lot of these problems have been reported on Test for some time, and they pushed it anyway.

I have 2 windows 10 laptop PCs that are unplayable.

"Why were our expectations so high?"

Mine weren't. And in any case, SOE now DPG doesn't have a sterling record at these sorts of roll-outs.
My expectations were, in fact, pretty close to accurate.

That having been said, and having been just a teensy weensy bit negative about the roll-out, I do hope that the Enhance Vision thingie can be tweaked into a pseudo gamma slider. I am not holding my breath, but I do hope that I can brighten up EQ without having to wash out the rather more important things I do on this computer.

Yep, I had a situation where EQ would continually crash my PC in 'newer' zones (ones with rolling terrain instead of classic polygons) I was using an nVidia 1070. That hard crash ONLY happened in EQ, not civ, fallout, borderlands, factorio, etc, etc.

Swapping that 1070 for a 960 and the crashing stopped, so then I upgraded to a 2070, still no crashing

Was there a bug in EQ that somehow only affect my hardware combo? or just a defect on the card that somehow only got triggered in EQ, and never any other game?

I suppose also, many labtops don't have a graphics card. Just using onboard (motherboard) graphics. Things that weren't designed for what eq does.

My expectation was that DX11 would be no worse than the existing DX9.
Unfortunately I was proven wrong.

I'm sure many of these issues were reported by players on the Test server, and ignored as seems to be standard.

Really? And how many people are quite happily playing modern games, with far higher requirements on these laptops?

Categorically false. Daybreak is fully to blame due to attempting a rollout of DX11, personas, UI updates, and a new expansion simultaneously. This rests with their leadership's unrealistic decision making and EG7's lack of sufficient oversight.

Of course I and many are very thankful for the great things Daybreak is accomplishing in keeping the game rolling. We just need increased focus on polishing individual rollouts. DB leadership needs to set more realistic expectations for their development team.

I suspect there are fewer people who have problems than those who post here over and over and over claiming to be many (and without using multiple accounts).

It is impossible for any development house to be able to test every single possible combination of computer hardware + OS + applications running in the background even if they only focused on Windows 10.

Windows 10 has been EOL (no support by Microsoft) for a year. Microsoft support for Windows 7 ended in 2020 with the support for Windows 8 ended before that (so very short lived). This is not the first upgrade to Everquest that has also adjusted the minimum requirements. The update is needed to be able to let the game run on current hardware better and to run on future hardware at all. Emulation causes a lot of overhead and some video card drivers might be ending that kind of support going forward.