What causes this problem in mmo's and how to fix it

[treyvon]

So i was just doing an open world pvp in Swtor with about 16 other people on my side with at total of about 30-40 people in all including my enemies. The performance was horrible, but i had expected that and wasn't disappointed because i was getting done what i needed to do, quest wise. So i had a nostalgic memory of WoW when we used to hop into the opposing factions main city and try to kill the leaders, and how laggy the game would be with all the characters in screen.

So my question is, WHY is that? what piece of hardware is it that can't run the game smoothly, because i'm about to build a new pc, with a 2500k and a 7970 and i don't want the lagginess when large amounts of players are about.
Btw, my latency was great the entire time, so it isn't internet ping.

 

[CDdude55]

I believe that's an issue on the server side, it might be bogged down trying to handle all those characters at the same time. Your ping will not show such a thing of course as that is only the latency between you and the sever and not an indicator of whether or not the server can actually handle the load.

Both WOW and SWTOR are not very resource intensive, so upgrading to a 7970 and 2500K would be unnecessary. What are your system specs?,

 

[treyvon]

I'm on my laptop, which when i bought it was very top of the line, but as of now its not even par, let me see..
i have a 5650
and a first gen i5 2.66 up to 3.3