Feldon 
With Tuesday’s patch, hundreds of art assets were changed and clearly some changes were made to the game client, because ever since, certain players have been experiencing missing foliage on plants, missing NPCs, missing clothes, missing city bells in Freeport, etc. From Jamiss on the EQ2 Forums:
Several people have noticed issues of equipment not appearing on their character at all, or their character not being visible, NPCs not being visible or Lodizal’s missing shell. The underlying cause has been found and we also have a fix in place which we are working on getting out to you.
I checked, and this is working its way to Public Test. As far as the crashes that some of you are experiencing, we see the data and we’re looking into the cause and a fix for it.
After receiving one crash report from a player, Maevianiu had this response:
You ran out of memory. Your computer is barely on the line of being able to run EQ2 and it looks like you are running a 32bit OS (Vista?) which is not letting your operating system get all the use out of the memory you have available on your computer.
You can try increasing your virtual memory, and/or lowering the memory use of other things (it looks like you only 1.8GB of memory free when starting EQ2). My guess is that, you were barely on the line of being able to log in before and with the extra stuff in today’s update (like assets for upcoming live events) it put you over the line.
Commentary
Nobody is expecting players to keep buying new computers to keep up with EQ2, but any reasonably setup computer built within the last 8 years will run EQ2 just fine. The problem is computers older than that, running Windows Vista, that do not have enough RAM or video card memory to handle the graphics. With the Altar of Malice, a new Terrain Tool was introduced that allows designers to build an overland zone in days instead of months, with a graphical fidelity far higher than before. Zones can now use five textures (with blending) instead of two. The new tool uses Shaders 3 which has thrown some very old systems for a loop. Those folks may need to seriously consider getting a new computer. One can be purchased today at Best Buy for $300 with integrated graphics and will run EQ2 at Balanced or even High Quality.
I am bothered by the implication that these crashes are due to out of date machines. I have a less than a year old state of the art gaming laptop from Razer (the Blade not the no video card model) and I am crashing 3-4 times a day when prior to this update I can’t even recall ever crashing on EQ2. And it is always right after I zone, so that screams application bug to me. So while some people may be using older systems I call BS on blaming dated hardware and object to it being portrayed as such.