Major decrease in graphics quality in new Heavensward areas- unacceptable

[Enkidoh]

A lot of the issues those screenshots you posted clearly show problems associated with your graphics card/video drivers and are not the fault of the game itself (especially the ones showing scenery tearing and deformation - graphical artifacts often are a sign your video card is dying a slow and painful death). You say you've turned all the settings up to maximum, then I think that's a sign your system simply isn't capable of running the game at that level. Turn down the settings and things should improve - don't be so quick to point fingers and accuse the development team for 'a decrease in quality' in HW (which there isn't). Maybe a hardware upgrade is in order?

Hells, my crappy Athlon X2 dual core with 2gb of RAM and Windows XP is running HW areas fine and with none of those issues you're showing, but then, I don't have the graphical settings turned up to maximum so there you are.

[Pancakesandsyrup]

I hate to say it, but you're plainly wrong. Graphics cards don't magically exclude content, lower polygons or decrease texture sizes if they're "dying". This is the quality of the game. It might look somewhat more exaggerated in terms of its pixellation because the screenshots are small and taken from only one portion of the screen, but I can guarantee you my graphics card is working just fine and none of the issues are with it- they are specifically relevant to this game only.

I was incredibly careful to include things that could not possibly be the result of the individual configuration of one's system. Polygon counts are fixed- unless you magically have a system that's tweaking the LoDs on everything- a polygon is a polygon is a polygon. My issues are 100% valid and they still stand.