Interesting. So you DO keep it in the early game because the characters do need to be initialized SOME time and by the time you reach rank 15, most of it will be done?The rankcheck is to prevent the jerky behaviour in later game. If a character is higher then level 15 he will be calculated during the loadtime instead of the runtime.
Doing everything at load time would make loading times during the early game REALLY slow and during the later game that would improve.
But to reduce loading time at game start, you do some initialization after loading, which makes for the lag, but at least doesn't make the player wait so long.
In the later game, it will behave as if it WERE all included during the loading itself which, by then, should be a lot shorter.
Did I get all that right?