This....needs to be replaced ASAP

[Amnmaat]

*sigh* I swear you're doing this on purpose.

I'm not talking about gossip, just your claims that people are calling you names. Obviously I don't understand why the moderators do what they do, otherwise I wouldn't have made a thread about it.

So to bring this whole farce of a conversation back on topic: the texture in an area where no-one will ever visit or the large majority of players will never notice is fine. Adding needless textures in zones like that causes unnecessary strain when loading areas. It's the same reason why most models are just hollow shells and one of the reasons, or so I've heard, that 1.0 failed. Because everything was needlessly over textured and it caused all kinds of rendering problems for people.

You finally turned off the gossip channel.

I don't think you understand what you're talking about. Bringing bad sectors to the same level of detail as the rest of the environment has a negligible effect on processing. The major reason why they had to do things like this was because of 32bit OS memory limitations, not because CPUs will explode if they replace bad textures from the game.

At least grass has a semi-decent reason—it’s everywhere. But you brought up an obscure tree that I’ve never even noticed, and I’ve been playing for coming up on 4 years in a couple months...

When it comes to art and design there's no "this is more important than that" statements, it's subjective. It all falls on the devs to evaluate (re-evaluate) their design standards. With the game dropping 32bit OS support this is a great chance for them to re-evaluate some of the worst visuals of the game.