Makes sense. The models I'm talking about might be able to handle 15% of the total numbers in one arena as AH3. I suspect it's different priorities in the netcode. (I'm not complaining btw) Just an observation.
In some gaming scenarios you would do that. And it has some advantages. In fact, in an Authoritative Server design, the server could even calculate all physics and collisions.
Only control inputs from players are transmitted and the server calculates the next frame's game state and sends out a state update. Great for preventing cheating.
You might could get 30 players on a server like that.
HT realized that would never work for a MMOG so he chose a distributed peer model, which means you have to have some heuristics for synchronizing inevitable games state divergence between moving entities.
The chosen design is clever and choses the best of imperfect options that works pretty good 95% of the time.
In the degenerate edge cases, you can at least say you got what you saw happen on your front end. A player might get angry when the other plane doesn't die, but only because they were looking only through their own viewpoint.
Most rational players would not prefer seeing they clearly avoid the collisions only to be killed by an invisible plane. Not once it happens to them.
If you really wanted to complain, you could complain about the gunnery model where in a two-circle fight I might see my pursuer clearly not have enough lead yet but still get the hit message.
That is also imperfect but better watching your bullets lay into a target with no effect.
All you can do is pick the less bad trade-off.
