Time to beef up the servers upload rate or something. None of the other MMOs I've played have had problems with displaying hundreds of people at once, even at pretty good distances.

From my experience just running around Ul'dah, it only loads people a second or two's run from you. It seems like it's also built into the client, since in the market wards, retainers that have already loaded will disappear if you walk a few steps away from them.

I guess this is one more thing we can hope will be in the magical 2.0 release that fixes everything that's bad, eh?