The problems movement incurs aren't "game mechanics" so much as "3d chatroom mechanics". Buff tracking as a performance hit is surprising to me, though. I'd pr

The problems movement incurs aren't "game mechanics" so much as "3d chatroom mechanics". Buff tracking as a performance hit is surprising to me, though. I'd presume you were tracking monster lifespan - with this and an offset for 'AI interruptions' (like for chasing players as the buff wore off) you could recover the buff times and remaining durations without touching the monsters when they were out of player LOS. I can see LOS as a more taxing system, but monster LOS has no z-axis and the dungeons don't seem to require too many nodes for a pathing graph... At any rate, most MMOs have rather... shallow... gameplay mechanics, and I don't think it's really computation that's holding them back.