Why is there a copy protection system in the graphics, and is it crippling the game?

As you said, speculation. There is no evidence that any of their protection schemes for the IP (yes it's their IP and lots of hackers would love to climb in and start stripping out graphic IP for their own uses) are the cause of erratic performance on "some" peoples machines. And if it were, it would be on the processor side of things mostly, and frankly this game has yet to be blamed for being processor intensive. I have a "last years" i7 processor and that thing never goes above 30% when running the game. I dont have lag or fps issues either.

IP protection: Blame Lucas Arts for this, as I am almost positive they put the requirement on Bioware for IP protection.

But all of this is separate from the textures complaints some people are insisting on. Now, Reid's explanation on textures makes complete sense in the context of how the game actually performs and behaves. They made performance trade-off decisions so as to not cripple lower end machines on the client side.

Their only mistakes were:

1) not being clear about this on day one (in fact, in beta), though I'm not sure you could ever be clear enough with so many 'lite geeks heads exploding off their necks because their ultra-high comp isn't allowed to render textures to it performance limits.

2) having three texture settings in the preferences, when in fact the game currently only supports two. This is probably a sloppy carryover from beta. Once again, if they had been more responsive to the community (see number 1 above) they could have avoided the misunderstandings in the community of players.

Should they work on higher textures and other higher graphics performance options for users of high end machines? Sure. Will it take time. Yep. Will crying about it or threatening to /quit change the fact that it's not there today? Nope.

Sadly Mr Lucas wouldn't give a damn thing about your war zone. He is more interested from protecting he's intellectual property.

People are misunderstanding how the method in the paper works. That method, even though it doesn't sound like it, involves the server rendering EVERYTHING. That would mean everybody is playing the game like OnLive. They are not doing this, you can test it yourself. (force AA in graphics options, AA comes on. This would not effect a remote server rendering).

I too am skeptical of EA an am loathe of their DRM. But this game doesn't have that.

DRM isn't necessary in an MMORPG since you're always online, they can just check your account. Thats all the DRM in the world, always-online.

And nobody in the history of video games has every tried to protect an art asset by the sort of methods described. The paper was in reference to museum models or other cultural or religious artifacts.

If this type of remote rendering was going on, then why do I usually stay around 10-15kbps usage and max out at 30kbps in Imperial Fleet?? It's the exact same usage as WoW, FFXI, and any other MMO I've played.

And that extra 20gb in the beta version was because it was not a localized copy. The beta contained ALL languages whereas retail is localized.

Lol at people basing Lucas.

He has creative rights, but further then that, nope, its all EA.

And this is not to protect his precious Star Wars, but to make sure people dont make private servers. Because lets face it, you could play this game like a singleplayer and not feel a difference.

You have to admit though, there are two companies that would pioneer protecting art assets: Ubisoft and EA.

what? i have 2 localizations installed (german and english) and my client is 27 GB large. beta client could not possibly have all languages installed.

As far as I know, machines don't overheat because of software but because of being dirty and/or badly vented.

Starcraft 2 would like to have a word with you.

The main screen of SC2 made lost of gpu's go boom because they didnt put a fps cap to it so they overloaded. So yes, software can and will detroy your hardware.

^^^^^^^^^^^