What does it do? Does it still have a function? or is it like nipples on a man, just a side affect of earlier things.
It was originally intended to let everyone 'catch up' to the current gamestate when a new player joins. The game would pause until everyone was current, regardless of how much information the current gamestate consisted of.
It may not be necessary now, but it's probably not doing any harm to have it there, and is probably so basic to the netcode that ripping it out would be tough.
Definately a GSH thing...
-Av-
It pauses the gamestates so no new updates are made when a new person joins, it waits till the new person is synced to the gamestate before it will continue. If it is off, then the gamestate is sent it real time, along with any updates that are currently being processed, can potentially swamp lower speeds to cause an additional gamestate to take place. Also, when an odf that is not normally in the build list (aka, like placed by the dll later on after game load) is in the game, bz2 has to load those up as well potentially causing a nice resync occuring for them since they will miss a few updates. I tend to load many odf's after the fact in my dll's, the preloadodf() command works well it seems but I should probobly test if pause join would help this as well.