[Tyhm]

Yeah, Peer-To-Peer (as opposed to the other P2P, Pay-to-Play).
Like I said, I don't really know enough about the architecture...I don't reckon the AIM server has a whole lot of thinking to do in maintaining people talking to each other, even while masking their IPs from each other. But then, making random connections and randomly quizzing these connections could be just as bad.
Which pretty much leaves us back at "Either have the player do the calculations, or have the server do it." If we lived in a world where players could be assigned relative lag indexes, and said indices would be stable, we could trust the two high-powered processors to do each others' work: player1's fighting the bomylord while processing the mushroomlord for player 2, and player2's fighting the mushroomlord while processing the bomylord for player 1, and all the server's doing is occasionally checking up on them...
Pipe dreams, oh well, it woulda been nice.