The cost of hardware is a rounding error compared to the expected gain/loss from a high profile game like this. WoW says they spend $50 million an year on its maintenance, and while that sounds like a lot, WoW easily pulls more than $1 billion a year or revenue (and often more). It makes absolutely no sense to skimp out on hardware, which is cheap, when you're talking about this amount of money. At any rate, it's not a proximity issue. It takes the speed of light 0.01s to go from west coast to east coast, so there's no reason to query sooner than every 0.01s in any MMORPG (speed of light isn't fast enough), so we'd expect WoW or any other MMORPG to exhibit the same problem with 3% the frequency compared to FF14.

However, this ignores the fact that in any game with PvP your 'don't die' ability better work 100% or people will definitely notice it. If an ability like Ice Block fails with 3% the frequency compared to how often you fail to dodge a WotL in PvP, you'd have people demanding heads roll. The fact that you don't hear about these issues implies this is clearly not a problem in any other game.