Quote Originally Posted by BelgianRofl View Post
There are people with PCs that could accommodate such reflections. They should just make it an option now. Pissin' me off!
The fact that your PC can accomodate them on MMOs that have a low-poly environment doesn't mean that it would with a MMO with such a high-poly environment (and high resolution textures, that's important as well) as FFXIV. I have a quite powerful computer (dual GTX 460, Athlon 64 X4 965 be, 8 gigs of ram), and I seriously doubt FFXIV would run with an acceptable framerate on it with those effects on.

Personally I think that Square Enix did the right choice focusing on making an high-poly, high-detail environment with less effects, as opposed to a low-poly, low-detail environment with more effects, for two reasons:

1: MMORPGs are Hedonistic enviroments, most people are more interested in looking good than in anything else. At least graphics-wise.
2: (much more important than point 1) It's more futureproof. Adding effects down the line as hardware evolves is *relatively* easy. Adding detail to characters and environments, via the implementation of higher poly models and higher resolution textures requires a lot more work, an almost entire redesign of the game. There have been several issues of developers that tried to this to their game, and it resulted in striking inconsistencies between models that had been reworked and models that didn't receive improvement or received too little. With the fact that MMORPGs last very long in the market, this will mitigate aging of the graphics by quite a lot.