Character Textures Spontaneously Downgrading

Anyone else notice this as of the patch December 2nd?

I usually play in 3rd person, but if I scroll my point of view too far out, *or* switch to 1st person, when I go back to 3rd person, my character texture has been bumped down to Medium. I have it set to Maximum, and in the Options window, the setting hasn't changed. But every time, I can adjust this setting from the menu, and it instantly fixes my texture. But I can reproduce the problem every time I scroll out all the way, or switch into 1st person momentarily.

Then, later on, I realized every NPC's texture was downgraded, too. But if I adjusted my settings (went to Options and flipped Character Texture to one setting, and then back to Maximum) it "fixed" the NPCs' textures too - until such time as I got too far away from them. Then, when I went back over to them, even got right up in their face, they were still at Medium.

If anyone has any suggestions, that would be cool, thanks.

This has been happening to me, too.
Last night, it was particularly bad. The settings in OPTIONS still showed everything at maximum, and changing them made no difference. My own character's textures would reappear in high detail upon zoning, but as the previous poster indicated, as soon as I pulled back with the camera and zoomed back in, all clothing was once again in low resolution. I was never able to get the NPC's or other PC models to render with high quality clothing textures once they downgraded to low quality.
One of the reasons I love the game has to do with the details in the graphics. Having to look at blobs of color covering my own and other's characters ruins the gaming experience for me.

This is happening to me too, 100% of the time. Its new and very frustrating, with no hardware or software changes on my end.
8800GT on Windows Vista 32 Bit. Changing any video options did not fix the problem that I found.

Same same same... and guess what! I hate it and it makes me sad. Any chance of an official response?

My concern is that many people might just be playing through this numbly, without noticing. But for those of us who have textures set to High or Maximum, it's definitely frustrating and sad, because the game looks really poor.
And it's definitely a new thing, I never saw it before December. It was happening in Kylong Plains, but then also when I zoned back to the guild hall. I was able to fix it the way I described in my original post, but the problem always returned as soon as I either scrolled way out, or shifted to 1st person & then back to 3rd. And, what makes it worse is that every other NPC or PC looks terrible, also.
I haven't changed user interfaces or configurations or hardware or drivers.

Same issue here, also running Vista 32 bit. Very annoying.

windows xp here so its not just a vista thing

Its also reducing some of my inventory textures, making the icons very blurry (But this is rarer than the first person, texture downgrade thing)

Anyone have any clue as to what to do? Its not playable like this once you have seen high quality graphics.

AFAIK this is actually programmed in the game.
If you're experiencing this is open zones then I suspect it is a result of the higher than normal number of people in the zones (following the ext release).

Magnamundian wrote:

Hmm, I'm gonna go out on a limb and rule out this possibility, because A> I was seeing it in Kylong Plains - not a new zone, and B> It didn't coincide with expansion's launch/game update date, and most importantly C> I saw it in my guild hall when I was the only one in it.
But thanks for the brainstorming help. Keep the suggestions and thoughts coming!

It has nothing to do with the number of people/NPC's in a zone. It kept happening to me everywhere, including inside the Cove tradeskilling instance last night, where it was only me and one other group member.

also getting a lot more crashing after the patch -__-

This is annoying, I dont play on "Extreme" like some of you people, but I do play on "Balanced" which is quite a bit nicer then "Extreme Peformance".
Ive changed my settings quite a bit to see how often it happens, and it is 100% repeatable so hopefully they can fix it quicker then the Multi-Core support crash.

So I came home from work and bit the bullet and installed Vista SP1. Then, upon discovering that I did NOT in fact have the latest recommended video drivers, I downloaded and installed those, too. When I first logged into the guild hall, I thought it had fixed it, because I couldn't get the textures to drop just through scrolling my point of view in & out. I camped to another character, still ok. I zoned out into NQ, and then into Antonica and tried again, and bam, same problem.

I would suggest submitting a /bug report on this issue. I haven't been able to verify it myself, yet, but it seems like enough people are reporting it to warrant an investigation.

Yeah all my drivers for -everything- are current. Can we get an official response or something???

The game is downgrading to low textures because the fix the other day is forcing eq2 into low memory mode, thats what i think is happening.
When you zone a few times, eq2 still hold things in memory, the more you zone the more memory gets taken up, until you reach a point when the game say "getting low on memory, downgrading textures"

This started happening to me today. I would reset the video options to fix it and as soon as I would move it would go back to having no detail.

Anyone from SOE reading? It's not a holiday still is it? =P Anyways lets get some sort of response. This sorta sucks.