That's true if you are in programing class 101 and use irc like communication for the back-end of a game, for chat functions however, a 1-2 second delay but a usable tool that can be built upon is a good feature, in difference to the current mess that is. "Speed" is not an issue here and has never been in the history of toribash, the main issue has been the dependancy of good hardware hence all the rounding errors the client spits out all the time which leads to a pretty bad development cycle. Not sure why more suitable vector coordinates werent used for the game itself, but it has nothing to do with "speed" in the sense of client to server (client to client) communication. The latency of a chat wouldn't even be questioned if it were kept below 2 seconds, since the only way to test it, and notice it, would be if you "HAD" to send messages quickly, which isnt the case in TB. Now, not having game commands being sent on the IRC line is pretty obvious, but all client to server communication could easily be parsed out of chat by a simple lookup or parse-through if a command is invalid.