Hi @Napalm_Death32,

The short story is that in MMOs, predominant player culture can and does have an impact on a surprising number of things; including tic rate and client rendering rates (and in alpha test versions, server stability )

Now, for the long story.
Once upon a time.... Zzzzzzzzz

My frame rate's locked to 100. If it dipped below 100, I missed it but it'll be somewhere in 280+ hours of video! I'm connecting from Australia so NA ping's typically around 240-260 mark although my personal best is 999+

Sadly, the 999+ moment didn't last long enough for me to break anything!

So, bearing in mind that frame rate can be impacted by latency - especially when rendering assets under server authority; in which case it has to wait for server confirmation before the next frame can be rendered - I don't think this is the case here or my frame rate wouldn't be locked to the cap and we'd be seeing similar per capita drops in frame rate.

I play in another game where there are different server regions (Europe, United States, Australia and Asia) and, well, to say the least: there is a definite cultural impact on gameplay (more shenanigans on the U.S. server shards and more 'orderliness' to gameplay on the European server shards, for example). Ping dictates the server regions which players play in and, well, players bring their culture with them.

For example, in that other game I play, U.S. server shards tend to be more prone to instability - not because there's any network curse in play but because, in a statistically significant sense, U.S. players are doing more things which that game's netcode isn't designed to handle. As you can imagine, once tick rate gets low enough, frames begin to tank wherever there are interactions that are heavily governed by server authority.

What players do and how they dress up their characters and character assets can have a big impact on rendering when enough of them are doing it. If, for example, the game doesn't pre-load all of the character assets for other players (and you know when it preloads every other player on the server shard because it makes loading take a loooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggg time), then a lot of "just in time" or rather, last minute rendering gets dumped into the PCIe lanes (very limited on Intel boxes) and this can result in a performance drop.

And, of course, what players do and how they dress up their characters is heavily influenced by culture. Presently, I've been kicking around on the NA "megaserver" and, well, I'm seeing a lot of tinsel textures and special effects. It's very pretty and it makes it hilariously easy to make my character blend in with the NPCs! But, I imagine that somewhere in the works, there's a rendering cost and I bet I'd be able to see it if I loaded the game on a different test box.

https://howtogeek.com/142193/htg-explains-why-lag-and-low-fps-arent-the-same-thing/

Also this article helps explain this issue, what it does, and how to fix it.