How dumb is the client really?

[Ruvanal]

Any input? Has anyone looked at this or know of people/sites that have?
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I have not looked into it, but do have an incident from the early closed beta test (phase 1) to relate. Most scoffed at what it meant, but do consider the implications for what you are asking even though a lot how the game works has changed since then.

During that first part of beta the servers were very unstable and you could have some them failing while other servers continued to work fine. One incident that happened was that basically the world server for environment and mobs basically quit responding to any interaction with the clients, but the chat servers still functioned fine. There had been very little indication that this happened other than the players around you stopped moving or any other activity. They just stood where they were when this happened, but the mobs that were in your perception range were still there and continued as normal. This included my being able to have combat and kill 2 of them before I myself was killed (accidental multi-mob pull and rest of party non-reactive from my point of view). To me this pointed that the client still has a fair amount of the combat information at its disposal for handling a situation and is most likely only dependent on periodic syncronization signals from the server to stay on track with what really should be happening. After about 15-30 seconds pretty much everyone that was on was stuck where they at and unable to move; I would guess from the lack of sync signal. To me it looks probable that a lot of what you want is buried in the client.