The proposal is as follows. Offer players the capability to download an object mesh/skin to their system, or to download all data obtained. This would allow a player to save items and areas to their hard disk, in a passive manner, so that if the area does not change, the player does not need to download it from the server again. Thus, the player saves the servers and sims WORLDS of lag by simply rendering the items saved/areas saved from their drive, and not from the server.
This would also decrease clientside load times, and, while it could potentially fill the drive rather quickly, that is why it would be selective. To be blunt, some of us have quite a bit of drivespace to blow, and this option would allow us to help out the server by saving the objects, thus only putting the download stress on the server Once.
I think that also, by default, your Avatar, and all things in your inventory, should be mirrored to the client harddrive, again, in a passive manner. Thus, if anything changes, the server saves the changes, and THEN the client downloads the new changes from the server. If the client data ever differs in any way from the server data, the client would download the data from the server over again(Thus preventing people from illegally modifying their inventory.)
All in all, this option should be supported by anyone who wants to cut down on server lag, sim lag, and other potential problems. With this, you could have the program save the physical data of players that you interact with regularly to the local drive, areas that you interact with regularly as well, et cetera, even items(which would require a database setup of giving all items an individual code, but I'll get into the details of that in the next post...)