I am a programmer, so I am curious about this. The client appears to be Java Swing.

What about the game? I am guessing you are using a mysql database to store everything right?

Most of your questions can be answered in 'help coding in bat'.

As for your other questions, a wizard could probably answer better, but here's my understanding:

Some stuff in bat is stored in mysql, but the majority of stuff is stored in flat files. There is also a set of data that is stored in flat files, then pushed out to mysql for presentation to the web, etc. From what I've heard, lpc isn't very good at external sockets, so things like databases and talk to external apps are relatively slow.

The client is a java app, I'm not as familiar with that.