You know, I have played this game, which I ragequitted (not cuz of connection) and joined SK, then now I want to return to it again.
Its another MMO, and sure they have servers everywhere around the world, but if lets say I play on US, I don't actually get connection problems, other than health delay and thats about it.
In that game, unlike SK, any bullet like 2 cm away from you and you dodge it, doesn't actually hurt you. Your "NPC" (a.k.a Ghost) is still at where the bullet is, but the bullet pierces through the NPC with no effect on you. It doesn't matter how weak connection is (however too weak may cause client failure, the only con of weak connection is when you get hit, it only registers your health going down after about 3 seconds.)
So I think if they can do that for that game, I think this is a good idea to implement into the game (but yea, I thought of this idea too fast and happily, so there may be a few exploitable things, feel free to comment)
Basically it works EXACTLY the same, a surgebot is right in front of you, you run backwards but your "NPC" of the server is still at the bot, it will hurt you when the bot shoots at your NPC right? But how about if this was added, and now you only do get hit when your real character on your real screen gets hurt.
Now, there needs to be a bit of changes. Your NPC shows other players where "you" are on their screen, but your real character is on your screen. You get hit when your Real character gets hit. So what do the enemies aim for? Well, now the enemies should aim for your real character, just like in that other game, and even though on other players' screens your NPC is hit, you don't actually get hurt.
How about lockdown? Lockdown will still have the present system now (i.e your NPC is hurt-able).
Ok thats about it, I don't know whether this is an expensive feature to be inserted, but yea if OOO could add this, there is no need for more servers.
Feel free to comment of anything that may make this feature exploitable or put others to disadvantage.
Your idea has a term, it's called client-siding. You didn't have to explain it, I'm pretty sure OOO has already kick that option out to prevent hacks. I've seen client siding, and I know how bad it works.
Client siding leads to lots of hack abuse/botting, Maplestory, Gunbound, Trickster Online, you name it, you got it. What did they do, Hackshield add-ons, etc..
Sure, it may seem like it works flawlessly, there's also the chaos of peer-to-server synchronization, and server-to-peer synchronization (especially playing with other people), a lot of things can start to fall apart when things don't get registered the way they are supposed to be, you might even see other players getting hit but taking no damage because it didn't register on their screen or some nonsense like that.