Lagging Issue

I had a thought on how to give players an option to fix the games occasionally horrible lag.

When walking through a store how many people do you really notice? How many faces can you remember?

Give players an option to load a generic view for characters they aren't grouped or friends with, and when they add someone to their group or friend list (Or right click and examine) save their appearance to the client side hard drive so that info no longer needs to be sent from the server. Plus add in an emergency optional hotkey to disable graphics entirely, have green cubes for heroes and red for enemies so that when the Rikti attack Atlas Park everyone doesn't drop to 1 frame per 5 seconds.