[astrobe_]

I've heard of tricks like player position prediction/interpolation by the clients, in particular for the FPS/Sim genres, which I guess is mainly aiming at mitigating "lag spikes" more than optimizing the network traffic, but it looks like it could give some leeway to servers as well ?

[pjc50]

Prediction lets you see through time but doesn't reduce the overall amount of work you have to do - the update confirming the prediction has to be sent eventually.

Also, remember that the server cannot afford to trust the clients about anything, not can it let them have too much information about the world.