You have to remember that one of the reasons for the change to GSIV was the removal of ease of access to a lot of outside spells for everyone. The GMs wanted it to be easier to balance out end-game (capped) areas and that was impossible with the uncapped level system in GSIII.
Adjustments made going into GSIV to better balance the system:
* a hard level cap of 100.
* adjusted some spells to make them self cast only and/or short durations (60 seconds, such as Wizard's Shield and Wall of Force) so they didn't have to take them into account when balancing out higher-end hunting grounds. Having 919 or 1040 being a 60 second duration spell, the idea was to make them more of an emergency DS spell and not a "always active" DS spell they needed to account for.
Adjustments made since the change to GSIV to remove the balance changes from GSIII to GSIV:
* increased SK items
* adjusted spells/skills to increase AS/DS/TD/CS and at the same time reduce effectiveness of instant kills from spells/skills for players
* create more and more scripted items to increase AS/DS/TD/CS
* embraced pay events to dole out easy access to high-end items that continue to push AS/DS/TD/CS checks out of balance
* GMs become irritated folks are easily now bypassing AS/DS/TD/CS checks and not dying.....time to shift the paradigm and focus on non AS/DS/TD/CS systems to ignore all the crap they fed back into the game to create nearly invincible players
* adjust SMRv2 and shift CML to SMR2
- This is a two sided sword:
1) CML was awful by design for most players to defend against if you weren't trained in the same CML skill being used against you. So it's nice that this shit was removed from game.
2) SMRv2 defense was adjusted and shifted downwards to prevent pures from having the better SMRv2 defense while they stood in defensive stance. Now Forward stance is the most defense you can have against SMRv2 and the shift of everything going to a phantom dodge bonus system for races....as you level, you get a diminished return to your SMRv2 defense for all the skill ranks you can train in, which includes phantom bonuses from spells such as 911's dodge bonus (unless they changed how this calculates as you level, this is how it functioned in all the testing I did over a year ago).
2b) The SMRv2 defense impact I've seen on all my pures that they've lost upwards of 20-30 points of SMRv2 defense. Sure, CML attacks that used to always get them they can better defend against now, but on the flip side the other maneuvers that they almost never got hit from they are now getting hit by them more often.
Now with all these changes going on, the added scripted items, the ease at which a lot of spells are still shareable amongst the players, the ramped up pay events (mainly DR), the fact that folks are coming back to the game (probably due to the pandemic and folks staying home more) are all contributions to the aged game engine that cannot handle swaths of commands/input/output data as folks congregate into somewhat large groups in any place in the game.
Without them actually getting a person that codes (or several individuals) to re-write the game engine to handle the increased population and all the shit ton of scripts out there, sadly they're reduced to capping population at tables and basically muting rooms once the population exceeds their "magic" number - which happens to be 100 at the moment.
All they can do is band-aid the situation until something significant happen:
1) re-write the game engine (we all know this won't happen, they won't want to put the resources into doing that)
2) population of the game dies down (most likely to happen if life returns to some sort of normalicy)
3) they create a system of NPCs that replaces the need of Dreavening's spell ups (which sounds like something is in the works to head this direction) to hopefully reduce the number of people that attend the gatherings. Sure, some folks like to come and interact with others, but you have some that come just for the spells. A NPC spell up system may have the affect the GMs are hoping, but I'm not sure how that will fare with Dreaven and all the work he's put into all of this.
Sadly, the GMs came out and blasted that the Dreavening's spell ups were the issue at first. Not the gathering of a lot of people, but the spell ups. They did retract some and eventually came out to admit it was a limitation to how the system handles so many people in a room and it wasn't all just because of Dreavening's spell ups.....but how they jumped the gun and out rightly blamed Dreaven was pretty shitty.
They haven't said anything else in the game was causing lag issues, though, only large gathering of people in single rooms.....for anyone to outright believe this line from the GMs, well, you're a fucking retard. We all know that lag starting hitting in the recent 2-week period with the opening of DR.
Anyone remember previous lag issues that were caused from massive groups running Reim? Yet even here it was hard to get straight answer out of the GMs that yes, the larges groups running Reim were the issue.
Bottom line is, the system is aged and more and more scripted crap, additions to the game (looking at you Ascension) and the so far stable game population.....the GMs can't do shit to fix the problem outside of band-aid fixes if they won't re-write the game engine. The GMs should never have outed any one single person as being the problem and they should have owned up to the obvious that many players know. Shame on them for being dicks about the whole situation.