Adapt or die, technology is always evolving on a faster scale then we are probably ready for to be honest, however, its not going to slow down so either learn to like it or die behind it.
Newer isn't always better. Just in the windows world look at windows ME, Vista, and 8. Look at the launch and first year of Final Cut Pro X. Sure it is good to progress, but sometimes people push new for the sake of new. Some things need stability more than new tricks. Besides, the main reason operating systems change every few years is to churn more revenue, not progress.
At this point I think most of us would rather just deal with golden idols and elixirs. Sure they are not period correct and are way better than what should be available, but it is better than the servers being down.
I got a pocket full of quarters, and I'm headed to the arcade. I don't have a lot of money, but I'm bringing everything I made. I've got a callus on my finger, and my shoulder's hurting too. I'm gonna eat them all up, just as soon as they turn blue.
Newer models have updated features that older models cannot be upgrading with OR would cost to much time and resources to implement when you could build an entire new platform that will carry on through the technology linear progression. This doesnt just apply with OS's, it applies with everything today.
That may be, but again, newer isn't always better. For all of its faults, Master of Orion 2 is still an amazing 4x game that blows away much of what is out today. Baldur's Gate 2 is still one of the best RPG games of all time and the story blows away much/most of what Bioware writes today.
And eq hasn't been rewritten. There's no reason it couldn't continue to run on xp, they just don't want it to. I wouldn't be surprised if it had to do with a new visual studio or .net they're using that has to be backdoored to put on xp thus for most it wouldnt work. I spent about 10hrs one night last week tracking down all the dependencies needed just to run EQ on a fresh win7 install. Some were obvious, others not even remotely and I only knew those because of screwing with my own game server-code last month on win7. Wonder if they'll ever include those things in the install download like most programs do now. Need 9.0c resist, then you need c++ x86 2015 or newer, and to do that you must install sp1 on that fresh 7 install, you also then must get .net framework (In my experience 4.6 or higher) and you have to dig to find the right one. On win7hp 64 it's 4.6.1 or 4.7.1, and finally you gotta make sure you have the right drivers on video, onboard or card, or you get the no 3d error. Oh yeah, and bc of the UAC scrap from ME, make sure every one of these things is unblocked in its properties after you download it, and run as administrator of course. See, eq tells you about 9.0c in a roundabout way, it tells you about video in roundabout way, but it doesn't tell you the rest, it must be searched out, and MS doesn't tell you prereqs for installing those things either until it fails and you have to dig for why. All these things make new eq installs a bigger pita than in years past. After this patch I shudder to find out something in that list has to be further updated to even continue running on 7. I wonder how much is actually the game and how much will just be the launcher/patcher that I only use to patch and bypass the rest of the time
