There's a post somewhere on here Dusty made years ago about reducing the amount of visible players on screen (on mobile) to reduce (user-end?) lag. This is a social mmo where you can't see other players.....

Baddies, gralats, bombs, and arrows should not be laggy.
-If I drop a bomb or shoot an arrow, I shouldn't have to wait 5 seconds for it to spawn in. Bomb explosions shouldn't last 8 seconds long.
-Baddies respawn, take damage, and deal damage inconsistently.
-When I run into a gralat to pick it up, it still sits there for at least 3 seconds.

We're forced into a single player experience but we can't even do that anymore.

631 players online right now, just sayin'.  

Logged in to see whether there's any exciting news and nope.

As far as people being hidden to reduce lag time, Graal is using an engine where I don't think drawing is the most optimized and then they allowed people to have wild and crazy GIFs for hats and such for some reason.

Bombs/Arrows/Baddies/Gralat Drops/etc. lag is all because of server lag. There's server lag because they don't want to have people giving themselves a gazillion gralats and stop making money from people buying gralats. With the condition that this needs to be done serverside in place, the best way to improve user experience is to do instantaneous animations on the clientside with load time animations until things register on the serverside...kind of like how a lot of console games hide level loading screens.