Haha if you crash every 30mins likely you wont have this bug, it has something do with roaming around a lot of zones. Im not sure what it is, because I know the OP has a ton of ram. It happens to me also, I have 8gigs of ram myself.
To explain it a bit better, you will wonder around, and you will start to see no buildings, and all new trees. Like the land is 100% fresh, other than some of the terraforming. Its like the world was wiped again save for new terraforming.
You cant see animals nor other people either, or baskets.
How I perceive it is I am running along and hit an invisible wall. You can try running in windowed mode, and while making a jump yank the window around a bit ... Often you can then continue on, but you will see the zone de-sync and it will look like many have described.
I run an Nvidia card, with 512mb of memory at how and have this problem there, at work I have a 256mb card made by ATI and never see this issue.
It sounds to me like you're going into an "Offline Mode" and simply viewing the world that is installed on your computer. I'm guessing you are disconnecting from the server but not being booted from game.
In the Mortal Online beta, when the server was not up, you could still play the game client, which was just an empty offline world.