One day a guy in chat said he'd only logged on to ask a question or two, and was going back to play offline for better performance. That made me test the difference as well, and it REALLY eliminates almost all the bad perfomance. The game as a whole runs much faster offline, including world map and zone loadings, performance in zones, etc.
Here are some examples, as it is on this ancient low end machine.
Loading a saved game (to the point the game is fully responsive and available for playing)
- offline - 15 seconds
- online - 1 minute 49 seconds, 100% cpu usage the whole time
Creating a new character (to the point of fully responsive character creation screen)
- offline - 12 seconds
- online - 1 min 55 seconds, 100% cpu usage the whole time
Soon as the game or the character creation screen becomes responsive, there is a burst of chat lines - that makes me think the way the online profile and/or the chat server is loaded and synched after causes the whole slowdown. I also remembered that the game usually started to run really smooth somewhere around 4-5 AM CET when I was playing all night back in December. It didn't make any sense back then, cause nothing on my PC changed at that hour. I now realize that was exactly the time the ToME server restarted and you had to reconnect in 10-15 minutes to use online features and chat.
Long story short - please, check if online playing can be sped up by any means. I really want to play again, but those issues have become quite the turn-off.