I don't think the problem is the number of RuneScape gold players on earth, it is the amount of players on earth in precisely the planet chunk. We used to have this specific same problem with the GE way back daily. You can tell when there's more people regardless of where you are. World 99 back had a portables group move into it. It would have approximately 100-300 individuals and afterwards it would have 600+. There was a noticable delay even only moving anyplace on the world. By what I have observed, the server lag is made by plenty of players in 1 world chunk. Example would do anything on world 77 feels laggy even if your. Same with soda dxpw worlds.
Yeah if you think lighting a fire in an area has the server tell you concerning the fire. Lighting the fire that is exact same has to send that passion in the exact same time to all 1000. I really don't understand how much optimization they perform to non visible players but it's possible that every single player in a pile of players has data about their location/actions constantly being sent to every other player in the region even if it is not visible on your client.
It works just a little bit different. Your client is requesting the host the condition of Runescape in your town. Hence the server checks which players are on your town, what they're wearing, and what they're doing (and a whole lot more). Since he has to fetch participant details of 1000 people in regions that are large the server has a undertaking to do. That's why you will notice lag too, the server is busy with handling the spots, he can hardly get your request sorted.
RS2 had much more gamers (although much more robots ) than RS3 and we'd seen 250k+ gamers online frequently in summer and 1000+ players on each planet was no problem back in 2011. Technologies have improved tremendously today a decade later, it is believed that RS3 servers have been in worse shape than the RS2 era. RS3 can manage a lot more players than today, particularly gamers will imply more servers will be added. The stability problems of the servers today is some players do for. RS3 just want load balancing and buy osrs gold safe exception handling of particular actions. It is not a big issue.