FFM is not wrong that we need to save the bandwidth and server horsepower for actual players. But do keep in mind that CoH (mostly) worked at launch, with FAR less capable servers and networks than we have available now a decade later. My suspicion is that if you include what you can farm out to the clients, you may well have MORE raw processing power available than Cryptic did at launch.
Yes and no. Yes, server hardware is far faster now, and for that matter implementation technique is better now. But players need to understand that no, server horsepower is not higher now than it was before, its actually *lower* for the simple reason
we don't have servers. Not in the conventional gaming sense. Everything you are seeing is happening because either a) your client did it or b) another client did it and sent a message to your client to also do it. You jump, you see your character jump. She jumps, she sees her character jump and her Paragon Chat sends a message to your Paragon Chat so you see her character jump also.
There is no server that can tell everyone "here's a pedestrian, move him here." None whatsoever. The only way with Paragon Chat's current architecture to make pedestrians move is for Codewalker to add that capability directly to Paragon Chat itself, and to do so in a manner that everyone would see the same thing - otherwise it would be problematic if everyone started to see a totally different environment (I mean, you could do it, but its something I suspect Codewalker would really not want to do).
Everyone, from people running this on the fastest gaming rigs to people running this on their old Pentium desktops, will have to be able to run the City of Heroes client itself *and* whatever Codewalker puts into Paragon Chat. If he decides to add NPCs, everyone's individual clients will have to be able to support them and in a synchronized fashion. And then this starts to snowball. Do we broadcast NPC localchat? Do we perform NPC collision detection?
All these issues have solutions. I mention them not to suggest I lack the capability of conceiving ways to solve them. Its more to illustrate the scope and the limitations surrounding the problem. The fact that computers are faster today than they were in 2004 is largely irrelevant to the actual problem(s) Codewalker faces. The problem is that Codewalker can't really do this in the same way the game's mapservers did, because he doesn't have central mapservers to work with. However he solves the problem, it will have to be different, support things the game never had to, solve problems the game's mapservers didn't need to worry about, and do so in a way that doesn't make it harder for people to run Paragon Chat for its intended purpose of being a community communications platform.